Former Apple Store employee here! You would be surprised by how people become blind from all the smokes and mirrors of the Apple branding and advertisement.
I remember one day, there was a 40-something years old man, that came in with an iPhone X and switched it for an XS, adding 500 euros.
Only to return 1 week later to switch the XS for an XR with better storage, adding 250 euros.
Only to return 2 weeks later, to switch the XR for an XSmax adding 400 euros more or less.
This gentleman was so brainwashed into FOMO by Apple that threw 1000+ euros out of the window.
One other time, there was another gentleman that clearly couldn't afford an iPhone X. He was so torn when deciding if to buy or not. I tried to give him hints that it was better if he let go of it ("maybe wait next year, your iPhone 5 is still doing the job"), but no, in the end he decided to go for it and we tried to do a 6 months payment plan. His card got rejected. Then we tried with a 10 months payment plan. Rejected. Then we tried with 20 months one. Finally, accepted. He wasn't even happy about that. Was probably thinking about what he was going to have to renounce for that iPhone. I tell you, the whole process was physically painful.

>I remember one day, there was a 40-something years old man, that came in with an iPhone X and switched it for an XS, adding 500 euros. Only to return 1 week later to switch the XS for an XR with better storage, adding 250 euros. Only to return 2 weeks later, to switch the XR for an XSmax adding 400 euros more or less. This gentleman was so brainwashed into FOMO by Apple that threw 1000+ euros out of the window.

Sounds like quite orthogonal to Apple, and relevant to personal issues the single anecdotal example person had, overcompensating by constantly buying gadgets, etc...

There are tons of people with 2, 3, 4, 6+ year old Macs, iPhones, and iPads (my iPad is from 2014 or so and works just fine)...

Yes, what you said is completely true. I am not saying that Apple is evil, I personally own Apple products and I think they're great (but overpriced). I just wanted to point out the length some people go just to have Apple in their pockets. Apple is not evil, but they know what they're doing, and they know that the prestige of their products is used by people to try and neutralize the sense of worthlessness they feel inside.
This manipulation is even more evident now that they are selling phones that are almost identical to the previous generation, bring nothing substantially new to the table, if not new smokes and mirrors. I'm sure that in their headquarters, they now spend less and less time innovating and more and more time refining their selling skills.

I didn’t resort to scavenging anything. I just looked at his HN profile. Why have profiles if not for us to look at them?

I honestly expected to see him engaged in something that was against the kind of preying on insecurity he claims Apple is doing, and was curious to see what it was because I want to see examples of marketing that doesn’t do this.

I was genuinely surprised to see what business he was in, and find it bizarrely hypocritical of him, since he is doing exactly what he accuses Apple of doing.

Apple stuff lasts, this is not an Apple issue, any of those phones would have been good for several years. I'm only my 3rd iPhone in 9 years (soon to replace it though). Also 3rd iPad in 9 years. My Macbook Air is from 2012. Apple do software updates going quite far back. A lot of Apple's hardware looks exactly the same from generation to generation, so even if you updated, how would anyone know? If customers want to chop and change that's on them, Apple is not forcing it really.

What you said it totally true. But to say that Apple is not forcing is a white lie. It's true that they're not pointing guns at us, but they are smoothly pointing us in that direction. There's a psychological pressure to have the latest tech, otherwise not only your phone, but also you yourself, are outdated and uncool. No kind of manipulation was ever forceful. That's what makes it a manipulation. You think you're doing it, but another person/company slowly brought you to do it.
A lot of people are intelligent and strong enough to resist this brainwash, but a lot of others are not.

I'm sorry if I came off as a virtue signaler. No I'm not blaming Apple, and of course people would buy cool things to look cool even without them. What I'm saying is that Apple is especially good at applying pressure in right spots: as you said, the human desire for status and fear of being left behind. Some still haven't recognized it and I've seen countless people make poor financial decisions because of their blindness to what is moving them to buy. Maybe I should have used "aware" instead of "intelligent", since intelligent people can fall for it too. Of course I'm generalizing and as you said, people also buy Apple just because they like it and can afford it, I did that too. But too many times I've seen people really torn and staying there thinking to themselves for half an hour if they should buy it or not, because they know they shouldn't. If you just like a thing, but you know that buying it will have very bad financial consequences for you for the next 10-20 months, it's not difficult to resist. So the fact that all these people were buying anyways, makes me come to the conclusion that there were more powerful internal forces moving them, then just "liking Apple".

You can have the batteries swapped out though. I had the battery on my 6S replaced twice. The first time I got it for free because of the degraded performance issue and even the second time was very well priced ($60??) and have the phone a new wind. However, now the power connector had become very loose and disconnects randomly when moved wrong. I probably could have that fixed as well for cheap, but want the new camera. On my recent vacation I took almost no photos because I wanted my wife to take all the good shots with her XR Max.
I'm on the fence though because I use ApplePay a lot and cannot imagine using that with FaceId and I also am somewhat attached to the audio jack. I don't want to carry headphones for my phone and another set for my Switch when on a long trip.

Pro tip: 95% of the problems with the power connectors are due to dust trapped inside the charge hole. Yes, there is a lot of dust in there, even if you can't see it. No worries though. You can solve that problem in 2 minutes. Here's how:
1 take a clip, or something similar (thin and rigid) and use it to dig out the dust from the connector hole in your phone
2 be surprised at how much dust you actually find
3 keep digging out the dust
4 your phone is as new! Try charging it and you will see that it won't disconnect randomly anymore.
Hope it helps :)
p.s: We charge 10-15 euros for that in the store, and obviously don't tell how easily we got it fixed to the customer. I know, it's funny and infuriating.

When I had problem with charging on my iPhone 6 I've went to Apple Store with that and "genius" at Apple Store literally told me to use SIM removal tool to dig it out and then he proceed to do it on my phone as I watched. Pins are only on one side so as long as you be careful and not bend them you will be fine.

I don't have air pots. I've been thinking about buying them since a long time, but I really don't have a good reason to other than that it's new and shiny. At least when traveling I'd still have to carry my current earphones for both my Switch and to connect to the airplane's entertainment system. I'd rather have fewer things I can lose or forget it simply have to find a place for. It's not a problem in everyday life, but I'm on airplanes a fair amount and the is never a good place for stuff like this.

I’m convinced that the camera quality degrades as the phone gets older/more used. What convinced me was my mom receiving a brand new 6S replacement from Apple and seeing the major camera improvement even though her broken 6S was in mint condition.

Can anyone provide some insight to this? It took years of speculation for us to learn our slower OS/battery concerns were real. I’m wondering if this is next.

My 5s took enough spills that I think some small opening in the case let lots of dust/sand get under then lens. The OG battery was losing sectors left and right too. Probably fixable, but I went with a new phone anyway, 5.5 years on a phone was long enough...

The 2016+ 15" Macbook Pro is at least one very clear exception. Mine has had keyboard (which includes logic board) replaced several times. Screen replaced 3 times. Brand new replacement unit once. Now getting intermittent black screens every 5 mins or so. I paid for an Apple but I got a lemon.

So, basically you replace your phone every two years. That's the rhythm that Apple and cell providers generally aim for (time for new housing design and length of contract). What other expensive item are you replacing as frequently?

Typical consumerism. I have siblings who did the same for a fancy bed. These people are mostly helpless. And you're only an employee.. I'm sure it's not great to try to turn a customer away from a sale right ? Even as a sibling, unless I'm ready to start a family war there's no leverage.

ps: the 40yo man might have sold or made use of the other iPhone. I hope he did not just pile them up in a drawer.

For me personally, working there was a perpetual moral internal debate. I was good at convincing people that were on the edge of buying. On one hand, the more you sell, the higher the commission you get, for you and the whole team.
On the other hand, you have to sell tech that is one of the best, but for the time being, totally overpriced. Therefore, you have to manipulate a lot, and tell half-truths if not blatant lies at times, which is not great either.
This becomes much harder when you have to manipulate a person, that is clearly struggling in their decision because of financial reasons, into buying a phone priced 1000+ euros.
On the inside, I was always screaming "what in the world are you doing!"
The way I operated was this: when a manager was nearby me, I had to act the part, but when I was alone I tried, in a not so explicit way, to clear the fog in their brain and make them get back some reason in their heads. I prefer being able to sleep at night, instead of getting a few more bucks in my check.
To be clear, I like Apple products, and I personally own them ,because I was able to get them used (but brand new) with huge discounts in price, but they are not for everyone.
About the 40yo man, he gave us back his phone each time. The way it works is this: if you bring back a phone, you get an evaluation which is at best (even in perfect condition, got out of the box just a week earlier) half of the initial price tag.
You can get a new phone, give back your old one and pay the difference.

I read you work in Italy Apple Store, and this is the first time I hear Apple Store has commission.

Does anyone know any other region where Apple Store operate with commission, one of the things John Gruber likes to pride Apple are their employees don't have commission and therefore could give candid advice.

Or did All Apple Store has commission now since Burberry Queen took over?

Once you open the plastic outside the box (not even the box itself) you can't return it for free, it might have been compromised in some way. Its value is automatically cut in half in the store's eyes.

You're right. Here I shop only online, I haven't been in a store (other than grocery store) for at least 5 years. When I buy something online, they deliver it same day to my doorstep, so why would I not. You can (for a small fee) use their service to pick up returned items (or return them yourself at their service center with no charge)

Mmm that was not our policy. I worked in Italy, so maybe there are different rules for different countries. But something like trying it out for 2 weeks, then coming back and getting a refund or switching it (for example for a different color) was never ever allowed.

I forgot to add that it is only for online purchasing (the only kind of purchasing I do for 10 years at least). It's 14 days minimum set by EU regulation. The item should not be used, but you're allowed to try, verify that it works, return it if you don't like it (no explanation at all needed), etc.

I knew/know this person personally. We all knew him because he was an habitual client. He is working as a professor in high school. So the probability of him being so wealthy to change one iPhone per week are not that high. That said, even if he is, do you think that his behavior would be consider sane? His story is just to point out how the sense of worthlessness in some people is financially exploited by prestigious brand like Apple.

Sure, I think that he should have the literal freedom to do so, but that does not excuse him or Apple from being roundly criticized and berated for it. Like freedom of speech, your right to say something doesn’t make that thing right.

The cool thing now is that you can have a brand new 2019 phone with the latest tech for 300/400 euros. So if you want to keep the pace, you can do it without selling your soul. I think it's more about the temporary sense of worthiness that an Apple product can give you.

It plays music, like my iPod did. As well as podcasts. I don't use any apps otherwise that don't come with it from Apple. On the rare occasion someone decides to call me it answers, sometimes (it's slow to answer, but after 3 retries, sometimes the first).

I try to answer text messages on my Mac with Messages.app. It's easier to type.

Not sure I want to upgrade. I was planning on it. I can afford it. Kind of just trying to see how long I can keep it going for fun. I think I've had it for close to 5 years now.

When my 6 broke, I decided to switch carriers (from prepaid) to try out the new (at the time - earlier this year) XR. For the 1 week I owned it, there was something strange about it that I just can't describe. It wasn't buyers remorse, but it just felt wrong in my hands. I genuinely asked myself if spending 1k + 100/mo was worth it. Ended up returning the phone, returned back to my old carrier, and ended up going with a 6s making my purchase at 250 + 30/mo. No qualms.

Was it your first job dealing with people? People are funny, and it can be hard to account for their motivations and ways in which they want things and make changes. Ascribing these anecdotes to Apple's advertising/brainwashing program is a little bit silly.

Smartphone hardware is done. There's no significant gain in buying a new smartphone if you have bought one in last 3 years, absolutely nothing if the battery is replaced; there could be even diminished returns if you buy a new smartphone(unavailability of headphone jack, losing metal body, losing faster biometric authentication).

Improvement in camera could be enticing, but the platforms to which the photos, videos are shared would compress them anyways making them all nearly identical. Better frame rates is the only thing which makes a difference. Case in point : MKBHD made a blind test last year and low cost smartphone Mi Pocophone which scored pathetic camera performance in individual reviews came out top in the blind test.

So, the subscription services are the new lifeline for the hardware manufacturers; included free subscription should add some value to the new customers and if the SW services work; may be compensate for diminishing hardware sales.

"Case in point : MKBHD made a blind test last year and low cost smartphone Mi Pocophone which scored pathetic camera performance in individual reviews came out top in the blind test."

Marques doesn't have kids.

I loved my Redmi Note 4. I even liked the chin, as the buttons were on it - so my usable screen size was actually larger than the Pixel XL that replaced it.

That phone took perfectly acceptable shots with still subjects that I'd have been happy to live with but the shutter lag was terrible. I have six months of mostly blurry photos of my kids solely because the phone couldn't deal with any amount of fast motion so it had to go.

Recently upgraded to a Pixel 3a solely because of Night Sight and for my use case it was a no-brainer as I can't get the time back. I also couldn't give a rats behind about notches and bumps - my phones go straight into bumper cases and 9-glass before they're turned on.

Some people really do need the less-talked-about features that are only of late getting any amount of attention by manufacturers.

Absolutely. I had the same experience with the first Moto G phones - reviews called it amazing quality for the price and had camera samples that were admittedly very nice. There was no way I could get a picture of my dog in that time, or even a group picture with at least one of my friends/family members being blurry - there's always movement with people, even if it's a bit, and youtube testers rarely account for that.

I wouldn't say Massively improved. But it was definitely noticeable. By not massively improved, I mean photos from iPhone 8 looks fine, but when you gets to compare with X, you immediately notice the difference.

The same goes to X and Xs, although the difference is a little less drastic, but P30 and Pixel were both winning, and when you compare it, it was obvious.

Graphene battery, foldable display, 5G network, >1TB internal storage, Fingerprint reader at any point on the screen could all kickoff new generational cycle.

But, it will happen in increments and for all the above features to be available in one smartphone which is affordable, will take another 3-4 years and hence my OP comment that current generation is done.

I would love one, just for our(brain) memory or lack of thereof; especially to remember faces of people we meet once,
when we meet again after several years and they ask do you remember me? The smart AR glasses should give us the name via bone conduction!

>Fingerprint reader in the screen: Who cares if its below the display or on the back of the phone? It's a rather small improvement.

Fingerprint authentication at any point on the screen could decrease the overall time taken for unlocking the phone and getting to the intended action. It's quite common in android to have always on Amoled display for notifications, touching the notification can directly take one to the app without having to authenticate separately first.

May be it should have worded better, I reread the comment multiple times and I don't get where the current generation is done comes from. It reads to me as Hardware is done, period.

The market is saturated, and of course every company will try to milk it for as long as they could, while trying to figure out the next big thing, if there is any that is the size of current Smartphone market.

Not that type of blind.
Basically given a scenario, take a picture with n number of phones varying in quality/price. MKBHD the Youtuber then found that a worse quality camera came on top as the "best" quality for twitter/instagram users because that bad quality camera over-compensated with over exposure and some other factors (as far as I recall).

Essentially, camera quality in this day and age doesn't matter, unless you're a "pro" (which I predict 90% of the people who buy the 11 pro aren't)

Case in point: I have a SE and it takes photos fine. I'm not any model or pro, so taking pictures of basic day-to-day events or things is good enough for me.

A few years back one of the big Android sites did a comparison, some new Android phone vs the current iPhone vs some DSLR

They had people vote on the 'best' picture, and they always chose the sharpest one. You could clearly make out which camera took which photo. The biggest problem was that the DSLR was never focused right so it was blurry.

Not at all, most people do not take different pictures of the same scene under the same settings from about half a dozen flagship phones, post it on Instagram and ask which one is better. In fact, this is the only time I've seen such usage.

In practice, people use a single phone to capture moments that do not come back and even if the scene is repeatable people prefer to succeed on the first take, therefore they will take photos until they get one that is good enough and editable. Most people don't even know how the photo will look like until they try a few edits. It is an intuitive process that involves multiple trials and misses.

So the best camera is the one that gives you the photo that is easiest to edit to achieve the picture you desire. #nofilter is a special case, a niche and If you ask me, it's not a nofilter just because the device applied a filter by itself.

Anyway, if that test was correct the cheap and great photos phone would have been a viral hit. When people see a great photo, they do ask how you took it. That did not happen.

But at the end of the day it's not the opinion of a super-set of consumers that really matters. For owners of iPhones its whether the phone meets their own requirements and expectations that matters. Not whether huge tranches of non-iPhone owners agree with them or not.

I don't give a rat's butt whether 70% of consumers don't care about the features and characteristics of my phone. I care about them, and that's all that matters. Currently rocking a 6s which is serving me fine though.

I've been using a OnePlus 5T since it was launched and I can't think of any reason to upgrade. It's still as fast as the day I got it, the screen is adequate for me, and it does everything I want to do. That it costs literally 1/4th of an iPhone Pro in my country is the icing on top.

> Smartphone hardware is done. There's no significant gain in buying a new smartphone if you have bought one in last 3 years, absolutely nothing if the battery is replaced; there could be even diminished returns if you buy a new smartphone(unavailability of headphone jack, losing metal body, losing faster biometric authentication).

That's true in the Android world as well. When the GPS in my three-year-old LG Stylo 2 finally crapped out so thoroughly (along with a puffed-up battery, perhaps with a built-in antenna being damaged?) that I couldn't ignore it anymore, I wound up getting a Stylo 5.

As it turns out, it has the same Qualcomm 450 SoC as the three-year-old phone it replaced. It's fast enough for my needs, but no speed demon. The only real upgrades are support for more of T-Mobile's LTE bands, a higher-resolution screen, an aluminum frame, a 3500 mAh battery up from 3000, and Android 9; the camera app is improved, and the Bluetooth stack is more up-to-date. Much to their credit, they had the courage to not remove the headphone jack. There is one major downgrade: the inevitable sealed-case, non-removable battery schtick that I really hate. I hope that fad passes by the time I need to replace this one, but there's too much money at stake for the phone manufacturers not to shaft their customers. I better hope the battery doesn't crap out prematurely.

That being said, I like the Stylo 5; the 2 had excellent battery life even when the battery got puffy, and the 5 is even better (at least in my first week of usage). That relatively-anemic 450 SoC is at least power-efficient.

The smartphones will continue to grow and accelerate their hardware and software development. This is simply the future. I the next 50 years I think everyone will use just one device and this is more likely to be something like a smartphone.

What Steve Jobs did in his first iPhone presentation can't be done again. He simply set the bar so high that there is no bar anymore, I don't see how other companies will reach them, not because they can't but because they all try to copy them from that point on, instead of trying to innovate like they did.

I can't also really understand why the public is bashing so hard those events expecting miracles, and making statements that Apple is not innovating. What do you want cloaking software making you invisible? Let's be real, also who is that naive to think that even if they have developed something amazing they will release it right away. Things don't work like that in the real world.

> Smartphone hardware is done. There's no significant gain in buying a new smartphone if you have bought one in last 3 years, absolutely nothing if the battery is replaced; there could be even diminished returns if you buy a new smartphone(unavailability of headphone jack, losing metal body, losing faster biometric authentication).

Yep. I have a BLU smartphone that I bought for $55 bucks off of Amazon. It literally does everything I need and has now lasted me > 2 yrs with no sign of slowing down. I will never understand why people would pay the price equivalent to buying a decently speced out desktop or laptop for a phone when there are so many cheaper alternatives that provide the same features and functionality.

I use my phone so much now that all the actual differences in a more expensive device are significant. Even with the Pro ones it’s a bit like buying a mechanical keyboard. Does it really do anything a £3 OEM keyboard doesn’t? My phone was about the same price as my 3 year old i7 laptop and the processor is faster. It’s a more useful device to me.

I bought a couple of those BLU phones as testers to ensure our apps were usable regardless of device (in an office full of flagship phones this is easy to overlook in “hallway” testing)....I’m not generally a phone snob but I will say that using the BLU phones makes my 4 year old iPhone feel like an ultra luxury rocketship from the future. The difference in performance and quality is remarkable side by side.

> Smartphone hardware is done. There's no significant gain in buying a new smartphone if you have bought one in last 3 years

Agreed. Even a Xiaomi Mi A2 with Android One for 130-150€ is almost on par with these high end phones that cost eight times as much: It's fast enough. It has a gorgeous display. It has a decent camera and it has up-to-date software.
In these times of diminishing returns it's amazing that Apple is able to fetch these prices. It shows us how much of a vendor lockin there is. Perhaps (hopefully) also how much people are willing to pay extra for more privacy.

Yes, the chips and sensors used in modern phone cameras are ridiculously good for the size and cost. And phone cameras started replacing budget and mid-price P&S cameras years ago.

But, Apple's move to a triple camera set-up is really compelling. Not only has the phone replaced the average P&S, it's now replacing higher end P&S. The main argument for a separate P&S these days is a zoom lens. Apple just made that argument moot (superzooms notwithstanding). You can now take landscape, snapshot, and portrait photos natively on the camera without stitching or cropping. That's amazing. Or, at least I think so.

I was considering replacing my wife's older Canon S90 P&S with a new Sony RX100 IV. I probably won't bother - I'll just replace her iPhone 8 with an 11 Pro.

I guess that's why Apple seems to be positioning their Phones for `Pros`. I kind of feel like it's the `Note` equivalent of Galaxy series. And also for the same purpose, the showed videos of Professional Videographer shooting videos with the iPhone 11 Pro. Those are the people who'd probably take out raw video/pic and edit it in Premire or lightroom.

This opens a huge area of business for them, if they can convince ad film makers devices because the current set of filming devices that they use aren't inexpensive.

With Apple these days, Pro means ‘bloody expensive’, and even more so outside the US. The rebrand may help to justify the pricing, but it’s odd to do that with such an incremental update, rather than save it for a year with a bigger design change.

For a lot of the world, a $500 smartphone was a luxury, and a $1500 smartphone (like a $3000+ laptop, or $1000 monitor stand) is an unfunny joke.

While they’re amazing devices, they’re just not replacements for a real computer, being locked down, with no exposed file system, and the imprecision of touch-only input.

I live in a country where practically no one except businesses possess personal computers and maybe 50% of the urban population has a smart phone (usually some $30 Huawei crap). I worry that this kind of leap frogging that 3rd world countries do is harmful in this specific case. The web to them consists entirely of Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, and Instagram. Telecos provide extremely popular subsidized “internet” packages that consist exclusively of access to these sites. Instead of the web and technology being catalysts for production, they are solely used for consumption.

This in my opinion is very dangerous and will prevent the country from ever becoming a producer of information and services.

Eye tracking based scrolling would be something that I'd like; for reading long articles/books. Using regular camera is prohibitively power hungry; not sure if there is research for special purpose cameras for this purpose.

You can almost generalize to computers. It's still crazy the pace of pocket hardware has gone through. But these machines have more oomph than a pixar workstation in the 90s, the vast majority of the users will never even need 50% of that.

Unfortunately we all need the performance due to the unbelievable bloat of the web. And even with my iPhone X a lot of sites are still laggy and unpleasant to use. The state of the web is honestly really sad and makes me feel bad about our entire profession.

I get what you are saying but that would still be a pretty incremental update right? It wouldn't make the phone significantly more usable, really only a bit prettier.

I think the point here is that the recent "big" features are all pretty minor things like 60fps screens etcetera, they are really nice but nowhere near as important as the new things we used to have every generation.

The notch is a rather small issue that only affects looks. When the display is off, you don't see it. When the display is on, you usually look at the display, not the notch.
Sure it's not pretty but personally I don't really care.

Same for me! When I first bought it, I liked that it felt “premium”, but after using it for a while, I definitely have some strain in my wrist from the weight. Maybe it’s because it’s small enough to use one handed but too heavy to actually be comfortable. Have you tried a pop socket or something similar? (I have not) I’ll definitely be checking the weight of new phones from now on. I may even upgrade if the weight is less on any model. I would like to see something like the SE come out, because I want a phone that can do everything but is compact, but their solution seems to be the Apple Watch so you have a super small screen to accompany your phone instead of a smaller phone screen.

I’ve only had smartphones since 2012, but it’s definitely the heaviest phone I’ve owned and my wrist also occasionally hurts after using it. Older phones probably weren’t used as much as we use then today either.

Smartphones I’ve owned:

HTC One X: 130 g

Galaxy S5: 145g

Samsung Galaxy S7 edge: 157g

iPhone XS: 177 g

I’m happy with the screen size vs the phone size on the XS, but I didn’t realize I wanted something lighter too. This phone is way too heavy. The new iPhone 11 Pro is 188g. Hopefully next time around they make something lighter.

I mean the notch is basically the symptom of having gone into anti-feature territory. Removal of headphone jack, removal of physical home button, removal of TouchID for face recognition that is much slower, removal of 3D Touch... the iPhone 20 at this rate will just be a slab of metal.

I have the same feeling. Sure, manufacturers still try to experiment a little with their folding phones etc., but overall the software and hardware changes very little from one generation to the next.

I bought my last phone over 4 years ago and it wasn't new back then. The only reason I'm thinking about buying a new one is the software version. But it probably won't cost more than $200, because that's already enough to get better hardware than I got 4 years ago for double the price, and I don't have an issue with performance.

Needless to say, I don't quite get how flagship phones still sell so well considering you can do basically everything for a small fraction of the cost. Is there really a mobile game or other app out there which requires top specs? Would such a game even sell enough quantities?

The biggest issue I have with buying a new phone is getting fewer features(!!!). I have a OnePlus 5T and that's the last OnePlus to have a headphone jack. There's nothing that I can "upgrade" to without losing that feature(from OnePlus). And the performance of the 5T is more than enough, so there's literally no reason to upgrade.

Because my use case for headphones very frequently coincides with the times the phone is charging - I cannot both charge and use the headphones at the same time with an adapter, unless there is some weird USB-C monstrosity that would enable this(without just implementing an internal sound card connected over USB).

To me it seems the hardware innovation shifted from Apple to Google & Asia.

Google is hot with the ML train, they develop and release new state-of-the-art algorithms and improve all aspects of smartphone (videos, pictures, batteries, actions, gestures, keyboards, biometry, security, ...).

On the Asia side, companies are the first to release foldable phones. They are already acquiring user feedbacks and cost insights for the next generation of foldable phone, and Google is a supporting partner, with Android 10 embracing those new phones with new APIs.

Regarding Asia, forcing unfinished bleeding edge features into products just to be able to say ”I was first” isn’t innovation, but greediness.

Apple is rarely first to put certain component or piece of technology into their products, but is usually first one to do it properly and create first actually usable product. That’s why pretty much every actual innovation only takes off after Apple has implemented it.

It's been clear for quite some time that terms like "Extreme", "Pro" and "Max" are marketing terms. They are not accurate classifications of how they will be used.

If people feel strongly enough that the name is not accurate, they will have to buy a competing product that fulfills their needs at the price they are willing to pay.

I suppose what would be interesting, but highly proprietary, would be Apple's marketing research information on how the "Pro" marketing term is received by their target consumers.

All that being said, I personally have never bought from Apple, and think the $150 upgrade cost is ridiculous (not to mention the $300 jump from the XR, which is still $300 more than I paid for my Pixel)! So I could say the "Pro" marketing isn't working on me! But overall, they aren't hurting for customers.

"Pro" has been pretty useful, I think, as a marker in Apple's other product lines.

"MacBook Pro" and "iPad Pro" are the ones you buy if you need it for work, because the increased price will pay for itself with increased productivity. But buy the "Air" or basic versions if you are primarily using it for more basic tasks and media consumption.

Not sure the "Pro" distinction will hold up for iPhone, though. I guess it depends if Pro Photographers actually will give up their "Pro" cameras for an iPhone 11 Pro. And I can't think of any other profession where the iPhone Pro will "pay for itself" in productivity increases relative to other iPhones.

“Pro” is not just for productivity but comfort of use as well. As an analogy if you sit on a chair 8 hours a day you’ll want a super nice chair, even if it wouldn’t have direct effects on productivity compared to a just decent one.

For most people relying on a smartphone for work, be it 700 or 1000 the device will pay for itself in a few months at most, so I think the price difference won’t matter much. Better battery performance could be significant though.

Honest question, who relies on a smartphone for work? I mean, obviously people rely on a phone for work, people rely on email for work, but what jobs are there where getting the iPhone pro model would make a difference to getting, say, the now much lower priced iPhone 8.. or for that matter a used 2/3 year old flagship android phone?

The BBC make extensive use of the iPhone for news gathering. The photo, video and audio quality are all acceptable for online use (and broadcast use in many cases). LuCi Live is now almost the default option for radio outside broadcasts. The BBC have developed their own app to facilitate direct ingests of media content from iPhones to their asset management system. It's now entirely practical for a broadcast journalist to report on a story with nothing more than their iPhone.

I'm not sure how meaningful the "Pro" suffix really is, but the iPhone has undoubtedly become a piece of professional equipment in the media industry.

Not even exclusively for work. If I'm away from my desk for any reason, be it in my vehicle, in the server room, at a friend's place, and I need to urgently know something I always reach for my phone. My phone has my passwords and credit card numbers. My phone gets me connected to all my friends, near and far, for whatever reason. I have access to my email and most critical documents. I use the cameras and microphone to document my life, my projects, and special moments to me. And let's not be glib about it, it's a great tool for passing time between when I'm doing useful and fun things. I can browse Reddit while waiting for my wife to get her hair done.

I find it odd how people will happily pull their wallets out for a PC they will spend a ton of time on, but then balk at the idea of spending half that on a device that lives in your pocket and can help you do practically anything that comes to mind, even if all that comes to mind is entertain you for a few moments. Is it just down to the physical size of the device?

Frankly when it comes to phones at least (and often times any electronics) I just get the most powerful option available. Do I need it? Probably not. But in my experience:

1) They age better, and oftentimes are more not just useable, but actually a joy yo use, for a longer time

2) The price difference just isn't that much to justify taking a lower power device. Sure, the iPhone 11 would probably be just fine compared to an iPhone 11 Pro. But when you're talking about phones in that price caliber, honestly what's an extra $200? And I've never had a phone in my hand wishing it was less capable, so why chance wanting to replace it earlier?

Like I said, I bought the X at launch and that was to replace, in turn, a 6 Plus which was still very usable so I'm far from an every year upgrader, and I think that has to do with the fact that I always get the biggest and best, and then just age out a few cycles instead of continuously upgrading.

Yep. I wouldn't even say I necessarily have a cycle, I just upgrade when I wanted to. I passed on the 7 and 8 because they didn't have anything overly compelling. The X had FaceID, more gesture control which I like, and the better camera so I jumped on that one. Now I'm debating the 11 Pro just because that new camera also has my interest, and I really like the Midnight Green color, but I'm not sold just yet. I think I'll wait and see how long it takes Apple to start shifting units before I decide for sure.

Almost the same experience here. My old 6 has now gone to our son who continues to get tons of use out of it - all the iPhones in our family end up being given to kids for their phones when we upgrade. Usually the batteries are starting to degrade but the phones themselves? They last for years, and years, and years. iPhones are great

I mean, my gaming PC has roughly the same cycle, though I suppose that's only for given parts, not the entire thing each time.

I dunno, for all the uses and advantages my phone gives me, I'm happy to pay. My last one was an X and it's served me extremely well since I bought it at launch. I passed on the XS, but the 11 is tempting.

Photographers. Many will choose a smartphone that would work as a "b" camera. Is it really that difficult for you to come up with other examples?

Here is one: I'm a botanist. I take a lot of pictures of herbarium specimens (pressed plant specimens in natural history museums) to make morphological measurements. I have a Sony A7RM3 that is a MUCH higher resolution, better quality camera, but it's a lot bigger, requires more setup time, etc. With an iPhone, the pictures I take are automatically uploaded into Apple's cloud storage and available on my laptop. It's a very nice, simple, relatively seamless system.

I shot most of a City Council campaign this summer with just an iPhone. Took a DSLR to like two big events because I needed telephoto, but all our other official photos and social media stuff was phones.

If I'm shooting something for a billboard, yeah, I'll go get out a real camera. Almost anything smaller than that can absolutely be done on almost any modern flagship phone.

I see where you’re coming from, but it also feels like asking ‘why do you want to work in a nice place ? what difference is it really making that your desk has smooth angles and is made of sturdy materials instead of a particle plank with feets we’d buy at IKEA ?’

People can be productive and do fantastic work on any working material. But why have it worse when you’ll be using the device day in day out and stare at it for years ?

Well sure, but the particle board thing tcompares to getting a cheap Android budget model though. Not last year's flagship at 40% of the cost. (Well, last year's iPhone hasn't dropped quite that much, but in the Android world they often do with some smart shopping.)

No, I definitely agree, in fact I was going to give that very caveat ('aside from the pro model just being nicer to use if you use a phone all the time at work') but didn't want to presume your point too much. Also I was genuinely interested, maybe there are jobs like this and I'm just not aware of them :-)

Working at a "nice place" is what you care about when you've already decided that everything else about the job is going to suck. When the rest of your working conditions are decent don't care what your desk is like.

I decided long ago that I won’t work for places that can’t be bothered having decent offices, whatever they do, whatever they pay *

I don’t mean candy bowls or flashy sofas, but well lit, well ventilated, with decent toilets, noise isolation and living space between desks, and ergonomic chairs (at least adjustable in height and depth/inclination)

Cheaping out on work environment is the first sign of misplaced priorities IMO. Especially when it’s so easy to get penalties from work inspection.

I had been a Windows phone user for 3 years from 2009 to 2012 (HTC HD7, Nokia Lumia 800 and 920). Then switched to android for 7 years. Had a OnePlus One, <one more android here>, then a Google Nexus 6p, a Motorola ( solely for a 5000mAh battery as I was fed up with the nexus battery). Finally got an iPhone XS Max this year and I don’t think I am going to switch. My needs are to have a reliable phone with good battery life to last a day and that will run for 4+ years and get full security upgrades (else I don’t get work email on my phone). I think if I get 5 years out of it, the iPhone even with its 1100$ price tag will be cheaper in the long run.

I'm a startup founder and I use my phone more than anything else to demo my company's technology. But any of the modern phones is fine for this (I've been rolling with a 7 Plus since it came out), and frankly I prefer the LCD screens to the new OLEDs because of ghosting/lag issues.

There may be other folks out there who want the fastest phone for the purposes of demoing technology. For me, I mostly just don't want to look like I'm a luddite (although I've seen a surprising number of founders/CEOs who rock the SE).

"I have to waste money on conspicuously consuming the most expensive phone on the market or else my partners won't think my company is a legitimate business" is a great ilustration of how SV is in a bubble of phony valuation for phony products.

One thing the top end iPhone has is a better camera, and for tangentially-professional photographers, this makes a difference. ("Tangentially" meaning professionals that need photos, eg insurance claims adjuster, but that's it's not a primary focus of their job so an SLR doesn't make sense, eg wedding photographer.)

I'm a hobbyist/pseudo-pro(shot a couple of weddings) photographer that used to carry around SLRs, but have found the iPhone camera good enough to use for daily photography, so the best photography in a phone is a huge plus for myself as I can appreciate the photography enhancements.

Obviously for heavy lifting, I still would prefer an SLR with an assortment of lens options and such though.

I get that's the marketing intent, but the last iteration of MacBook Pros (with the gimmicky taskbar, the fail-prone keyboard, and glued items) has failed on that regard, at least for me. I had to replace the keyboard on mine, and it took Apple 10 days to do it. How is that "pro"?

Twice during this summer, I was not able to share my screen with coworkers using Zoom because my MacBook pro would overheat and throttle the processors. It might be that there's some dust inside the fan (I have a cat) but I am not able to open and clean it up. How is that "Pro"?

Our servers are all linux based and virtualization in mac is spotty (especially if you want to share a Docker-based setup via Zoom on a mildly hot day).

I strongly doubt I will go back to Mac when the time comes for renewing. I really do need to get stuff done, and this machine has gotten in my way too many times.

The Pro iPhones are definitely for 'prosumers' rather than actual professionals. You know, the type that has a semi-professional DSLR, but just uses it to take better pictures than anyone else when they're at a party or going about the city.

Pro photographers that make bank by being instagram influencers will be all over the iPhone Pro. This will completely upend the vlogging industry too.

I vlog with a DSLR and even with an iPhone X most people can’t tell when I use footage from that (running with a dslr is hard, for example). iPhone Pro likely makes better video than my T6i Rebel in many situations. Depth of field is usually where DSLRs shine

Compared to most new mirrorless or DSLR cameras, an iPhone is cheaper. A mirrorless or DSLR camera may have better sensor and optics (if you buy the right glass) BUT the computational capabilities of the phone far outstrip the computational capabilities of the camera.

I find that modern phones are better than traditional cameras a) by nailing exposure more consistently in tricky lighting conditions, b) having a far better display for proofing your shots, and c) can use computational photography tricks to create great HDR photos.

Accessibility and ease of workflow. I've had (and have) some nice cameras, but the phone is almost always with me and almost always more convenient to get at and use. The phone can also own much more of the lifecycle of the image than a stand alone camera. Viewing, editing, backing up, and sharing images are all much easier on a phone than at least the stand alone cameras I've used.

Where the standalone cameras are useful are where you need a capability that you just can't get in a phone. (And that's a set of capabilities that's been greatly diminished over the years, although it will never fully go away.)

The iPhone is a lifestyle product. It does a lot of things, but it does some of them quite poorly.

The new camera is better than it used to be, but it's still a long way of short of the quality you'd expect from a high-end professional photo studio camera.

As a lifestyle product, the important factor is the narrative that buying it will put you within reach of that professional creative lifestyle.

In a sense it will, if your definition is limited to lifestyle social sites like IG and FB.

But in a more honest and realistic sense it won't, because it lacks the quality and the flexibility of real professional equipment. A good DSLR + glass will still kill it, and medium format - which is what the most successful full-time studio pros are likely to use - will absolutely destroy it.

There are still situations where that high end is needed. Fashion, ads, and high-end portraiture and photojournalism all rely on it. I don't think studio photographers working in those fields are going to be moving to an iPhone any time soon.

My point was mostly that the definition of “pro photographer” is much wider these days than many people realize. For many values of “pro” an iPhone Pro is going to be absolutely fantastic and a better fit than higher-end pro.

True, but even then, your best camera is the one you have with you. I have a nice Canon DSLR setup, but appreciate good camera quality from my phone, because even if I don't have my camera with me, I almost always have my phone.

Because why lug around all your serious gear all the time to make videos people watch on their phone when they’re bored on the crapper? Or for insta stories?

But the part it’s really going to revolutionize is the baseline level of expected image quality. Just like Casey Neistat forced everyone to start using DSLRs for vlogging with his famed 2 or 3 year experiment.

> Because you iphone is accessible on seconds notice anytime anywhere.

Not if I'm travelling internationally, as then I'm concerned about the implications of having border officials demand access to my phone. Or if I'm participating in various watersports/snowsports/backcountry activities where a phone is problematically fragile and difficult to keep charged.

In either of those scenarios (which account for the majority of pictures I take) I'm more likely to have a camera accessible than a phone.

It's not less money, though. I can buy a telephoto, wide angle, and super wide lens and not have any money left over if my budget is the cost of an iPhone. The point isn't that the phone can replace those things in every situation it's that it's so good that it's more than good enough to replace those things for a significant percentage of the times I need them.

Case in point, I have an iPhone X and a DSLR with all of the above lenses and the camera kit + lenses were more expensive than the new iPhone and I probably would use them less.

> All that being said, I personally have never bought from Apple, and think the $150 upgrade cost is ridiculous (not to mention the $300 jump from the XR, which is still $300 more than I paid for my Pixel)! So I could say the "Pro" marketing isn't working on me! But overall, they aren't hurting for customers.

I love it when people complain about the prices Apple charge, especially given the experiences I've had with customer service at Apple, so... story time!

I had an iPhone 5 when it first came out. At the time I was a heavy motorbike rider to and from work. One day when I was riding home it rained heavily (this was in England, so yeah...) and my pocket had been left open. When I got home my iPhone was completely submerged in water for at least 20 minutes.

I took it to Apple the next day and they replaced it for free. Try that with your Pixel... oh that's right, you don't have any stores to take it into world wide. Shame.

Fast forward to only two years ago...

I was in Vienna for Christmas a few years back. We'd gone through Italy to get there. During my time in Italy I noticed my iPhone 6S' battery was dropping quickly. I couldn't work out why. By the time we got to Vienna it would drop by 20% every 15-20 minutes. I found a premium reseller who took it in and replaced the battery in 45 minutes for free. I bought the phone in Australia.

Try that with your Pixel... oh that's right, you have to post your phone to the manufacturer and wait for them to fix it or replace it, a process I know to take weeks. Shame. But you saved $300 though!

I personally don't think it's worth counting the pennies in that manner given the services you're getting outside of the hardware. It's not much of a price hike at all, in the grand scheme of things.

As it turns out, I've never destroyed any of my own phones, so I saved $300 every two years since I started buying smart phones 12 years ago. So $1800. If my phone gets submerged and Google won't replace it, I guess I'll have to buy another phone with my $1800 budget!

Also, when I got my Pixel 3, the back had some waves in the paint. It literally did not matter at all, because I put a case on it, and it couldn't affect functionality at all, but I told them I wasn't happy, and they shipped a new one that did not have the cosmetic imperfections. Try that with your iPhone! Oh yeah, it would probably work.

shrug This isn't a competition. Just be smart with your money (or do with your money as you choose, whether someone else thinks it smart or not!)

Expensive compared to what, exactly? Car insurance, which doesn't have a world wide chain of stores you can walk into when your car is smashed up? House insurance, which also does not afford you the luxury of world wide stores with commission free staff to assist you when your house burns down?

Most "insurance", if you want to call it that, doesn't offer you the same level of experience, so in what way is it expensive?

My house insurance doesn't teach me how a boiler works so I can use it correctly, or my dish washer, TV, or anything else about the property I own. Apple DO run classes for learning to do just about anything on your iPhone, iPad, Mac, etc. I'd have to only attend one, perhaps two, of those classes for the staff member's time to be worth more than what I paid for my "insurance".

So what are you comparing it to that makes it expensive?

> As it turns out, I've never destroyed any of my own phones

Which of course means no else does, neither.

> shrug This isn't a competition.

Then why did you argue price as a competitive factor in your purchasing decision? That's literally a competition.

It's expensive to pay nearly double for a phone just because they have physical stores where you've gotten phones that you've destroyed replaced for free.

It's expensive to pay nearly double for a phone because you feel you need classes to learn how to use it.

I'm saying it is perfectly fine if you want to spend more money for the Apple experience. And obviously you are fine with that, too. I prefer to use my money on other things. It's not a competition between rabid fans. It's a market for selling chunks of hardware. So yes, they are competing for our dollars. I prefer to maintain my decision-making over where those dollars go. Having special in-store luxury experiences is not why I buy a phone that takes pictures and does other things nicely, too. But it's fine if you spend that money.

Insurance is betting you're going to have something bad happen. Expensive insurance is when the ones calculating the insurance make a bunch of money off you because you pay a lot more than you get out of it. Paying a ton for a low deductible but never making a claim. If you personally don't destroy phones, paying a lot for insurance on them doesn't make sense. I never said no one else should do so, or that no one else destroys phones. Obviously you do. But still not enough to make up for the price premium.

Overall it's not a solid argument for the phone, but you have your reasons for buying it. It just does nothing to discount my reasons for saving my money and buying a different phone.

I'm not being dishonest. I'm basing it on availability. The Pixel 3 I own was purchased from Google Fi for $400. The price right now is $500. Technically the Pixel 3 XL ($600) is the flagship just like the iPhone XS Max / iPhone 11 Max are the flagship. (Looks like you can't buy the XS Max direct any more, so I can't find current pricing.) The iPhone 11 Max starts at $1100. That seems like "nearly double" to me.

I somehow managed to get an almost invisible crack on the inside of the Gorilla glass a few years ago via a drop. Took it into an Apple Store for a screen replacement; they gave me a fresh out of the box phone for free (partially because they'd never seen that failure mode before, partially because they were busy and my slot got delayed 45 minutes.)

(Admittedly, the bloke next to me with the iPhone 4 arguing that the back glass had shattered "all on its own; I didn't drop it, honestly!" probably wasn't going to get a new phone for free...)

Honestly I never really understood the need to chase the newest flagship given the premium price. I probably upgrade about once a year to 18 months, and purchasing the prior model flagship saves me about 60% to 70%. I upgraded to the pixel 2xl shortly after the 3 came out for about $260. Even being able to afford it I just feel I'm getting ripped off at $1000.

You then pay somewhere around 175 to 260 usd per year for your phone. The newest iPhones are about $1000. From my experience, and from others, they last a very long time, and a 4 year cycle can be expected, as well as passing the phones on to their kids and so on. There is also the possibility to sell it used down the line, and the iPhones keep their value much better than any Android phone.

Thus the "expensive" iPhones are $250 or less per year. And they are, in my opinion, usually better than the Android equivalent.

You might say; "but what if I have the same upgrade cycle with iPhones". Well, then you can have a look at what a used version of the last gen iPhone costs. Where I live; it is something like $100-200 less than what it was new. That means; some people are having the newest version of the iPhone for only $100-200 / year. That is, at least, roughly the same price as your are getting (or better, depending on resale value of the specific Android phone), but with the newest version of a more premium product.

In other words. You might be getting ripped off at $260. It all comes down to money over time, not amount at a defined moment, unless the amount is prohibitive.

Mostly sound logic and I switched to the iPhone 5 years back after a similar calculation. Only, the 6s started becoming wonky in 3 years and I most definitely missed _some_ Android features.

When it was time to upgrade, it apparently also became time for apple to jack up the price of their flagship to a thousand bucks and I just vehemently avoided that out of principle.

Looking at alternatives,the Galaxy seemed like a reasonably similar premium (not polished software fosho) phone, but sticker price was similar to iPhones. However thos things go on sale a lot. Nabbed a S9 few months after release for 500 and looks like it'll last me three years at least. Super happy with the hardware (and software actually) as well.

The only "flaw" in your logic above is that in principle an iPhone probably can last 4 years but that's not constant - models from them are sometimes just not as reliable (we talking 4 year reliability vs 3) and it's not just a thousand dollars, it's thousand and tax and bells and whistles (which for apple is always more). Plus you now have a premium phone that you better don't break or scratch (if you want to sell) or you're out a very large number of Benjamins.

That is true, but then again, you can probably repair it 3 years down the line. Repairing a 3-year old Android is usually not as easy.

Don't get me wrong, I am writing this on a Sony Android phone, which I expect to get 0 dollars for if I try to sell it. But from an economic perspective I don't think there is a clear advantage to Android devices.

Looking on ebay, you can get a new or lightly used iPhone XS 64GB (the only option that was as little as $999) for around $700. So if you bought it a year ago, your annual cost after selling it is about $300. The Pixel 2 XL goes for about $200 on ebay. Looks like it costs as much as $200 per year more to have the flagship iPhone new than it does to have a year old flagship Pixel.

In your opinion, the iPhone is better, so it's OK that you're spending more, but it's weird to say someone's getting ripped off by buying an excellent one year old phone for much, much less.

The money over time argument rarely works out as better for a more expensive item. Anecdotally, the people I know that buy a brand new flagship do not wait four years between phones. The ones that are OK with a one year old flagship are also OK with a three year old one. And even if they upgrade more often, it's just so much less expensive (over time.)

Real estate agents, industrial photographers, people who make money affiliate marketing, maintaining a (whatever) review channel on YouTube, journalists, heck even sales or running a small business, lots of professional use cases. The difference between good and great is the little things.

The photos I see on real estate listings are horrendously compressed and have a potato-like quality. I have no idea if they were taken 15 years ago on a $10 point and shoot or on a brand new professional DSLR. Only thing you can sometimes tell is that they used a wide-angle lens.

In my experience (Sydney, Australia) they tend to get professionals to shoot with a quality DSLR, then they get pimple-faced Photoshop jockeys to flatten the dynamics and punch in a fake blue sky.

This new extra-wide camera is interesting as it's fairly rare for a consumer-targeted camera to exceed a 24mm (FFE) focal length. Even in expensive professional lenses, getting to 13mm (FFE) is fairly unusual. Most ultra-wide glass stops at 16mm.

The idea that apple needs an extra $300 dollars to fit that into my phone, maybe i'll just get two pixel 3s. Or a nice point and shoot.

The 'bare minimum' that the consumer will accept vs 'the average feature set expected' vs 'lets sprinkle in some unicorn dust and charge people up the wazoo' model is getting a little old. Its why I have iPhone 6s, 7s, still in the fleet of devices I support. The consumer and businesses are simply tired of this bs.

Whilst I agree with your premise, the problem is that they explicitly made the distinction that this was for professionals. I can't remember the precise verbiage but when Cook introduced it he said that this was by and for professionals.

Well they specifically said it’s Pro users... and for everyone else who wants the best of what Apple has to offer. They could certainly remove the 64gb entry option and thus increase the base price but then everyone who only needs 64gb is paying more for a feature they don’t need or want. Rather Apple usually waits until part prices make it so they can both reduce the price and this remove the previous entry model which one can assume will happen in a few years.

"Pro" probably works great to bring in people trying to elevate their social media quality. It doesn't necessarily mean (in Apple's marketing terminology) actual, legitimate professional industry anymore.

I'd imagine people getting into vlogging and such, or even people who just want to be "that cool and popular" (especially younger people) that would buy in to the "Pro" moniker.

I made the point elsewhere, but I think that ignores "professionals in the workplace doing this alongside other things". These can easily be "pro" for content creation teams, like editorial staff for capturing Stories from events and the like.

Just because they're not replacements for high-end commercial photography equipment doesn't mean they're not being used as intended by professionals.

Completely agree that their terminology might be skewing, but I wouldn't be so dismissive of their use in a professional context, even if the users aren't "photography professionals" themselves.

I think "Pro" is just admitting that they're running into two tiers now. They released the 8 and the X together, they released the XR and XS together. The iphone has diverged into two products and hopefully they've picked a consistent name to differentiate them - because the difference between XR and XS isn't obvious at all.

Exactly. It's the same as with iPad and Mac. The name "pro" is just a throw-back to an earlier Apple, and it works because customers already understand the term. It doesn't matter if it is for real professionals or not.

“Pro” means more powerful. That doesn’t mean that you buy it if you need it work work. I know Fellows making $1m/year who have a MacBook Air because they prefer the low weight when they’re doing emails etc, and code from a desktop workstation.

These sorts of threads appear for every announcement. I chuckled seeing another user claim that it wasn't exciting because they didn't have something like Animojis to announce, that feature being a desperate "please try to buy this phone we're trying to justify this awkward face unlock thing".

It's an incremental update that also brings huge new features to the "low priced" version. And it'll do great.

Yep, cell phones have reached peak feature-dom and this iPhone X style design is excellent. We don't need new fancy bells attached to it just for the sake of it. Just make it incrementally better and faster, without messing up what was good about it previously.

I agree the product is in polishing stage, improving existing ideas and features rather than introducing new ones.

The focus internally is on the next leap forward, presumably an AR device.

If you go back and look at the iPod release history [1] between 2005 and 2007, (first iPhone released June '07) you can see a similar incremental improvements, specifically in software enhancements, improved form factor and longer battery life.

I believe the difference between then and now is that the Watch and iPhone are production testing grounds for hardware that will be used in an AR product. In this way the new product is being developed in the open.

Just for the sake of it, no. For the sake of Apple continuing to have some differentiating feature to get people to line up to purchase in a way that keeps the iPhone trendy, yes. Otherwise it's just like any of the other 5000 smartphone models coming out each year, and then Apple's stock goes down.

Lots of people disappointed in the new iPhone. The reason I see is simple; Apple has long been outsourced a large fraction of its hardware innovation capabilities to other companies rather than having a full vertical ownership of the production line, unlike its competitors (Samsung, Huawei, etc).

This works very well when most of the required technologies are already there for bringing their idea to the reality so Apple doesn't have to push the state of the art for the manufacturing technologies. Multi-touch, Retina Display, Apple designed SoC were all good examples where this strategy worked out very well.

The trouble is that now most of the low hanging fruits are gone and the rest of innovation opportunities lie within the manufacturer side and require non-trivial investments. For instance, getting rid of notch requires camera under screen technology. This is being developed by Samsung, their competitor. The same thing applies to fingerprint sensor under screen. While all the competitors are shipping 5G in their flagships, iPhone 11 couldn't ship 5G due to their hard dependency on Qualcomm. In short, the current landscape doesn't allow Apple to keep itself on the bleeding edge in the smartphone business.

I'm curious about how Apple will address this problem. Disappointingly, I haven't seen any positive signal to indicate that Apple has a good plan to address this issue. It first tried a high-price, even-more-premium strategy and this turned out to be a disastrous one. Apple now tries to expand into the services business and chooses to be a competitor to its own ecosystem by exercising its dominant position. I'm pretty sure that this plan will work very well, maybe too well sufficient to de-prioritize the iPhone business just enough to keep its marketshare around 3~40% and make no more commitments. I hope I'm wrong.

There will always be lots of people disappointed in the iPhone. We will only know the magnitude of disappointment once financials are posted. Speaking of which, R&D spend shows they are making non-trivial investments. Apple secrecy is what keeps you and I seeing the R&D results before they are ready. "Signals" is not something Apple likes to give, which is probably why you aren't seeing any. I would argue that hardware+software integration is more important than 5G, underscreen fingerprint, or notchless design combined. Apple is the leader in deep integration across hardware and software. Services is just an extension of having a default out of the box experience for the most important experiences on an iPhone. Nothing new here. First it was "notes", "calculator", "stocks", etc. Now they are moving up the services stack to movies, gaming, etc. Next it will be Uber / delivery via Project Titan.

> Speaking of which, R&D spend shows they are making non-trivial investments.

Unfortunately, Apple's R&D spend won't likely enable what they want to do on their phone. A large number of sources consistently suggests that Apple is experimenting various options to get rid of notch, but all those options depends on display manufacturers.

> "Signals" is not something Apple likes to give, which is probably why you aren't seeing any.

Apple definitely wants to prove their iPhone business has more potential to grow; why would they hide the growth potential of the largest business to their investors? The truth is that it doesn't see more potentials on its phone business and this is why Apple is aggressively investing into services business.

> I would argue that hardware+software integration is more important than 5G, underscreen fingerprint, or notchless design combined.

I wouldn't argue on a subjective issue, but just note that iPhone used to have the best hardware, software and their integration during Steve's era, which is not true anymore for hardware and the gap is increasing. As a 10 year iPhone user, this is very disappointing.

I don't think it is so subjective. Look at the customer satisfaction scores. You could certainly correlate those with measurable aspects of the user experience (software crashes, support handling, camera speed, render jank, etc). A lack of good hw/sw integration will show up.

As for not having the best hardware, what can you see about the A* series chips? They are industry leading year after year. Why? Apple took development in house [1]. Apple is now taking modem [2] and display technology [3] in house. They are doing all the right things.

Wozniak knows how to put it together more efficiently and Jobs scoured catalogs to get the best deals and knew where to source in the valley.

The secret sauce is just the Apple way of putting it together and serving it to you.

The clone wars era taught them to stop doing that but those days have been so far spread to now that this we're finding ourselves repeating similar mistakes.

Additionally there was also the Apple era of just rebranding shit for the sake of establishing halos and ecosystems. There were a period of Apple branded Sony monitors and Apple branded printers. They opted out of that and went with the retail option these days. At least they learned from that.

But yes, Apple got bigger. What once was getting chips from Sunnyvale to Cupertino is now getting chips from Shenzhen to Cupertino. And the milestone we've hit now is Apple today announcing a new camera with phone communication abilities.

I'm thoroughly confused by your comment. Was not Apple's FaceID a full year, if not more, ahead of the competition? Sure they didn't sit in cupertino, stitching together components, but they designed an integration of existing components in a way that saved space and made them work in concert in a way no other competitor had. I don't think they're in as much trouble as you make out

Yes, FaceID is another good example of technology that could be brought to the reality without long-term strategical commitments from other big (possibly competing) companies. I'm not saying that Apple is losing its edge on product technology "design". Apple will still remain to be the best here at least for several more years. But it's also still true that the technological bar for manufacturing components is rapidly going up and Apple doesn't have much controls in this area.

You think that Apple isn't working on putting the camera array required for FaceId under the screen? Of course they are. The problem is that it's the whole sensor array that has to go under the screen. Is that workable? Possibly, but I'm not a hardware engineer.

>Apple has long been outsourced a large fraction of its hardware innovation capabilities to other companies rather than having a full vertical ownership of the production line, unlike its competitors (Samsung, Huawei, etc).

Apart from Samsung which does Full vertical ownership, there isn't any other company which does that. And Huawei uses Foxconn as well, OLED from BOE, NAND and DRAM from Multiple Sources etc. There is nothing from Huawei that shows Full Vertical Ownership.

>While all the competitors are shipping 5G in their flagships, iPhone 11 couldn't ship 5G due to their hard dependency on Qualcomm. In short, the current landscape doesn't allow Apple to keep itself on the bleeding edge in the smartphone business.

Apple wasn't the first with 4G, but they drove 4G adoption. And 5G isn't even ready, all current 5G solution on the market are big, bulky and power hungry. But it is great people are driven into these marketing hype, only by doing so they could recoup some of their R&D investment. For Apple, they will move to 5G when it is ready.

Yes it didn't allow Apple to be on the bleeding Edge of Foldable Screen. Look at what happen to Samsung. Bleeding Edge means nothing. Not everything has a first mover advantage. Innovation doesn't just requires Bleeding edge, that is Invention. Innovation requires Invention that brings Value to masses, and for that to happen, pricing is often an obstacle.

I don't think that's true at all. Apple is the only player that has ownership of the most important parts of software, hardware and services. That's why their products are better than their competitors.

Camera under the screen etc. are gimmicks that don't provide real value to customers. On the other hand, having the most performant SoC combined with the most performant software does provide real value.

Apple hasn't really been on the bleeding edge for a while now. Android phones had bigger screens, wireless charging, quick charging, NFC payment years before the iPhone had those features.

Apple strengths are in integration, design and marketing. Like mentioned, other phones had NFC payments way before the iPhone, but I'd say mobile phone payment really took off when Apple Pay came out. That's the power of marketing and influence at work.

Well on the hand other the Apple FaceID was in fact on the bleeding edge. Apple introduced it two years ago and we're only going to see it on the Pixel later this year. And for SoC performance I don't think any Android phone can surpass Apple's chips from last year. Apple really is on the bleeding edge for some things. You can't expect them to be on the bleeding edge for everything.

This is a surprisingly thought-provoking comment and the theory checks out.

Until Apple are able to break out of this mould I feel they'll be stuck at this combination of

a) uninteresting yearly iterations

b) ever increasing base phone prices for little end user gain

I don't thinkt hey're able to paint themselves out of this corner on the smartphone front.

They have iOS as a decent but certainly not impregnable moat for iPhone. Some brand new groundbreaking product will be needed very soon to prevent the Apple stock price from steadily declining. (It already starting plateauing 15 months ago.)

Does everyone here also drive a base model Honda Civic because “car hardware is done”? This is a luxury product and people upgrade because it’s fun and feels great to have the fastest phone and fanciest camera. It’s not that big a deal, and it’s definitely not a ripoff.

Personally I drive the top-spec Civic of 15 years ago. I would never own a current luxury item because I don't think it's worth spending my entire life working for a product that will become normal a couple of weeks after I buy it.

Humans are only sensitive to change. A positive change feels good. No change feels normal. A negative change feels awful. A sensible person would try to fill their life with positive change.

For what it’s worth, a 2019 base-model Civic includes a backup camera, automatic emergency braking, adaptive cruise control, lane-keep assist, road departure mitigation, more airbags, and every other safety improvement Honda engineers have come up with since 2004. It’s also more fuel efficient, which would reduce your consumption of fossil fuels.

Are folks running ML training algorithms on their phones? Why does one need the "fastest phone"? How many apps are there for which how fast your phone is even matters? I am not saying people shouldn't buy these phones but the pricing on these things is absolutely insane, it seems people are basically paying an Apple tax on these devices. Even high end devices from other manufacturers are not priced this crazy.

Nearly every road in the world has a speed limit. Car manufacturers still quote top speed and advertise based a cars racing pedigree.

95% of bankers and doctors driving BMW or Mercedes don’t use these features but still pay for them. Same with phones but a $1000 iPhone is far more in reach of aspirational buyers than a $50k German car.

We shouldn't need them, but we do, because the quality of consumer software is very poor these days. To enable "rapid" and "agile" development, where "customer value" is delivered "continuously", developers write under-optimised, resource-hungry software that never gets refactored.

You're absolutely correct that the prices of these phones are insane, but let's be honest here – a base-model Samsung Galaxy S10 is $899.99 MSRP. You can get them on Amazon for $699, which puts them at the same price as iPhone 11. So I'm not quite buying the Apple tax, unless your argument is that Apple is allowing everyone else to charge high prices, in which case you may be on to something.

> Well, I do (although it's a base model Hyundai). I also still use an iPhone SE and will do for the foreseeable future.

I consider myself to have been "tricked by business" (as Macklemore would put it) when I bought a Tesla Model X in 2016. It replaced a 2014 LEAF, and I can honestly say that I regretted it and wished I had kept the LEAF. The difference in cost didn't make up for the difference in overall driving experience and utility for me. I've since traded in the Tesla for cheaper PHEV, and I'm much happier with that now.

I also am still using a Pixel 2. Nothing about anything else on the market today seems compelling enough to convince me to replace it. So I guess I'm joining a chorus on this thread.

Base Model 2014 Mazda 3, because yes, ICE car hardware has nearly peaked. I will continue to row my own gears in a little 40mpg sedan until electric is an attainable option. Same goes for phones. Buy cheap, buy well.

I'm quite sad they have removed 3D Touch from the phones. A minor feature I really enjoy with quick peeking — and bummed to lose that touch information for apps like Procreate Pocket and other drawing tools.

I thought it was a pretty good feature although it worked better when it was new and apple were more invested in it.

In particular the three best common uses were moving the cursor for the keyboard, selecting things, and previewing web pages.

1. Felt like they made it slightly worse at some point but still good (though it fails on some websites which try to do weird hacks things)

2. This was great. Selecting things outside the keyboard was broken by a software update a few years ago but the keyboard was still good. (A hidden feature is that if you select a word then press shift, the keyboard recommends capitalising/uppercasing the word. I wish this worked for larger selections, downcasing, quotes and brackets (and I guess ¿? too))

3. Was handy to see what a link had without wasting time (going there then back wasn’t perfect for buggy websites like twitter which break navigation). It also helped unbreak webpages that did weird things with navigation (the pop up was a “new” page which the JS didn’t see as a link click and if you pressed harder then navigation would be successful). It was I think always broken for urls with an anchor (I.e. ending in #foo) and would either not scroll on pop up or lose its place if you opened/new tabbed the page. In a recent version it breaks with high probability by laying out pages with a width of 0 so one cannot see the contents of the page in the pop up.

They've probably kept the "long press action" for compat reasons? It's equally undiscoverable. I'm not super sad about this one; it was a weird thing from the beginning. It shouldn't have been introduced at all.

This feature was introduced in 2014. The timing of the removal makes me think it's related to the departure of Jony Ives.

To clarify: In order to maintain app compatibility with this ill-advised HW feature that they are now abandoning, they will need to do something. I'm guessing they'll probably translate long press events into force touch events for third party apps. Do you have better intel?

Oh, I see what you mean. I would assume that the Peek menu UI will remain supported, or perhaps there will be a compat library that will port it to the iOS 13 context menus. I'm not sure. I also don't know how it would work if a pre-iOS 13 third-party app implemented both 3D Touch and a long press to do different things on the same UI element.

> The timing of the removal makes me think it's related to the departure of Jony Ives

This has been in the pipeline for awhile. The XR already didn't have it, the SE didn't have it, and the iPad never had it. It's the type of feature that can't be truly great until it gets full support across the board, but that never really materialized.

Perhaps Ives met severe resistance internally regarding this feature and the lack at least on iPad can be explained by internal politics? (The SE exception can be explained by cost cutting rationales.)

The lack of 3D Touch on iPad was due to difficulty getting it to work on the large screen (obviously nobody knows that for sure, but those were the rumors years ago).

The lack of 3D Touch on XR was due to cost, and apparently their plan to ditch it everywhere.

The lack of 3D Touch on iPhone Pro...that's disappointing. It would have been a great "Pro" feature to offer. A "Pro" feature that allows you to be more productive on your phone. Aside for the video features (which I don't see being used by professionals anyway), what makes this device a "Pro" anything?

3D touch is an _amazing_ feature for power users, and one of the few that markedly differentiated the iphones from competition. Biggest thing is text editing of course, where 3D selection increases productivity _several times_, but potential was even greater if implemented more.

Ironic that they are marketing this one as pro.

I bought a X recently and plan on keeping it for years. If they software disable it with an OS update or some BS i’m gonna be so mad.

Also, I feel kinda stupid saying it but I feel like this is the sort of thing steve Jobs would have pushed harder for

Force press to select a word just doesn’t really work well. I am trying it now in Safari and most of the time the word is selected and the menu pops up and when I release my finger the menu and selection instantly disappear. Other places with force touch actions I’ve found equally buggy.

edit: Oh i played with it a bit more and it seems you have to press gently first, then hard. You can’t press hard straight away or it reinterprets it as a light touch after you let go. That’s quite unintuitive.

Personally, I absolutely hate 3D Touch. I've never been able to get the hang of the distinction between it and a long press, so something as simple as moving apps around or selecting a character with an umlaut is incredibly frustrating.

It was a hidden feature that Apple struggled to communicate (and was hard to describe without physically trying it) was always going to be problematic.

How do you train users? What is the discoverability? It was a legitimate problem when most of your user-base aren't tech nerds and most people aren't reading the manual/help guides.

So you implement an app feature via 3D Touch and users just assume that feature doesn't exist (because they don't discover it). Then you add it twice (3D Touch AND non-3D Touch) and you're now maintaining two things, and have gained little to nothing via 3D Touch.

I liken it to Windows 8's gesture UI failure. If users cannot discover it, it doesn't exist. So you cannot really build much around it because you have to assume user ignorance.

By implementing it at the beginning of a UX paradigm cycle when the numbers of users are small, curious and in learning mode. Like how right-clicking was introduced when the number of Windows users was like 1/1000 of the number of the peak number of Windows users.

You don't implement it during/after peaking of said cycle. That's some crazy level of delusion/arrogance. Turns out not even Apple can do pull that stunt.

Most computer users still don't use middle-click/scroll wheel click, or even the back/forward buttons and they're almost twenty years old.

By simply pointing at another hard to train piece of hidden functionality and saying "what about THIS?!" you haven't really proven anything, except that with enough forced training anything can become common knowledge.

3D Touch is exactly like right click, but they're also competing against implicit training via passed users of Apple's own products, other touch devices, and even other computing (since no other platform has anything like 3D Touch).

The 3D Touch on the keyboard to edit text is absolutely amazing. I use it all the time and saves me a lot of time. I love it. It's a shame that most people don't know about it.
However I don't use any other feature with 3D touch, either because I don't know about it or I find it useful.

Disappointing that the base configuration of the iPhone 11 Pro has 64 GB of storage. If you're going to call it Pro and talk about how you can shoot professional video, you can't ship it with 64 GB of storage.

EDIT: Also, they don't let you jump to 128 GB. You have to go to 256 GB, for $150 more. I can see why they didn't talk about this at the event. People would have booed.

I’m pretty sure they don’t force everyone to shoot lots of multi camera 4K videos just because the model serves their needs in other ways.

About half of the people I help choose phones would be fine with 64 GB, me included. There’s no point making them buy a bunch of flash memory they will never use just to get the better still camera that they want.

> About half of the people I help choose phones would be fine with 64 GB. There’s no point making them buy a bunch of flash memory they will never use just to get the better still camera that they want.

But would you be counseling these people to get the iPhone Pro in the first place? I would guess that most folks who want the Pro would want more than 64 GB.

iCloud storage makes it fairly easy to not keep everything you've ever recorded on your phone, it really depends on the user. Back when you kept all your music and all your photos/video it was more critical to have a ton of storage locally.

Most people buying the expensive model will probably opt for more storage, but for those that don't need it I don't see a problem with offering a lower tier.

iCloud storage costs money. If you want to back up a phone that has 64 GB of storage you're going to pay $36/yr or more. Keep your phone for 2-3 years, and you're paying $70-$100 extra. Might as well quadruple your storage and skip the cloud.

I have no problem with them offering a lower tier either. That's what the non-Pro iPhone 11 is for.

I guess we have different ideas of pro users. I'll take the cloud storage / backup any day of the week. If you're really doing the math on $3 a month you probably shouldn't be looking at a $1000 phone regardless of storage capacity.

We do have different ideas of Pro users. I don't know any who use iCloud, which has reliability issues and is inside a walled garden. I'm as big an Apple fan as anyone, but iCloud is a joke.

I've even asked Genius Bar employees exactly how people are supposed to use the iCloud photo backup. They've admitted that they don't really know what to make of the system, which is not transparent with regard to what photos have been downloaded where. It is difficult for the average user to understand how the file-shrinking system works with photos, and which photos exist only in the cloud versus on their machines.

It's an iPhone backup, of course it's a "walled garden". It works really well, maybe you haven't used it in years. I can literally throw my phone into the ocean, walk into an Apple Store and within a short time be right back to where I was. About the only things that get lost are Face ID and Apple Pay, which don't last through any backup because the Secure Element is one way.

Not all iPhone backups are walled gardens. I can back up to my computer, and back that up to various local/cloud drives. I don't want another thing that's wedded to an ecosystem that I might leave at some point.

Also, if I'm already paying for generic cloud storage services, why should I pay for Apple-specific cloud services, at a more expensive price per GB?

Apple also has created a super terrible backup system, where iCloud and iTunes cant work together. Its very dumb that once I switch to local, that I lose iCloud. Maybe I want to go on vacation for a week, without my computer, and then come back and resume local backups. Why cant iTunes use iCloud as part of its version history??

> Most people arent plugging their phone into a computer, even weekly.

The phones have synced wirelessly for quite a long while now. And with wireless charging on the newer models, doing so is just so damn easy.

> Its very dumb that once I switch to local, that I lose iCloud.

Can’t you still rely on iCloud for saving and backing up app data, while retaining the full local sync and backup in iTunes? I don’t recall iCloud being disabled when locally syncing, and am pretty sure apps still save data to iCloud on my devices.

> Why cant iTunes use iCloud as part of its version history??

Is that really necessary when iTunes can already sync and backup the whole device as it is when you activate the sync/backup process?

The rest of my complaint is mostly about how complicated a restore becomes if I was using local backup, and then arent home for a while, and need to remerge local and cloud backups. Last I remember, the interface makes you choose one or the other to restore, and then your version history gets all mucked up, as the one you choose becomes the new golden branch.

Although I believe the app developers have to be aware of this and utilise the various storage options correctly - certainly in my latest restore, a whole bunch of apps had lost their state (logins, etc.) Most disconcerting and aggravatingly inconvenient.

Theres also a crazy amount of enterprise purchases who dont care about storage. Everything is stored off device, and an MDM is keeping whats on the device to a minimum.

Companies would still be buying 32GB by the truckfull if it was available. Apple was right to discontinue it because 32GB wasnt enough to run the OS anymore, while also being a usable phone.

Since you cant run a phone without iOS, and stripping the OS down isnt an option, I think they should be legally required to be truthful in advertising and sell it as a 50-55GB iPhone, probably 50 if they plan on using some of the space for device upgrades.

> Theres also a crazy amount of enterprise purchases who dont care about storage.

Agreed, but that's what iPhone 11 is for... There's virtually no commercial reason for 95% of enterprise users to have a Pro version.

A Pro version for most of 2020 that can shoot multiple videos at the same time in 4k, with 64gb... I don't know, doesn't sit well with me. I'm all for keeping the base model basic and as low-cost as possible to those who needn't anything more. But then either reasonably price your storage, or create a 128gb option in between, especially if you don't allow SD cards. And especially when Apple is just fine offering 128gb on the 11, but not the Pro... It's a bit much.

You can remove the icons from the home screen, but it doesn’t actually delete the app from the device storage. They’ve said that’s in case you need or want one of the apps again; it’ll “reinstall” essentially instantly.

Oh sure, I think everyone understands and expects this to some extent. But the Pro model should not have the same base storage as the non-Pro model. Especially with all the emphasis on the professional-level cameras on the iPhone Pro.

The sensors on the Pro model is still 12MPs. HEIC can compress the output of these sensors in an hard to imagine way. A movie takes around 60MB per minute in 1080p30. Photos are also somewhat negligible now.

The sensors may have stayed the same, but isn't it taking 3 photos now instead of 1? We don't yet know whether it automatically saves the telephoto, wide, and ultra-wide photos separately, but from the rumors I'd heard it retains them all. Perhaps this is a setting that can be changed, but it means that if you want to use the phone to it's capability, you're going to have a lot more photo storage than before.

One presentation today made a big deal about "able to record 2 video streams at once (among the 4 cameras)".

Capture rate for multiple streams is one problem. Storage space is another, solved largely by the seamless iCloud integration; get an unlimited data plan or Wi-Fi connection, and the imagery will all just migrate off the device until needed wherever.

A landscape image takes 1.5MB when compressed with HEIC[0]. Even it stores all three of them and uses a bit less compression due to better lenses and sensors, it'll be around 6MB per image. It's very efficient for the resolution if you ask me.

The non-pro model looks like the successor to the XR, no telephoto camera, the screen is LCD not OLED with lower PPI, and a cheaper frame (aluminum not stainless steel) and maybe one or two more things I forgot.

I noticed that recently and am wondering if I would be fine with the lowest storage option in the future. I have 128GB and have never gone above 60GB. I am sitting on 20GB's of local music that hasn't been touched since I switched to streaming music two years ago.

I "downgraded" from a 256GB iPhone X to a 64GB iPhone XS with iCloud subscription. The initial sync to iCloud Photos will take a few days, but after that one can consider the iCloud library to be the source of truth.

The iPhone XS is currently at 55.3GB filled, and I have over 400 apps installed.

The one thing that bothers me is the 2TB max on iCloud storage... I'm not close to hitting it, I think I've used 250 GB, but I'm also not that far away either with all these super HD iPhone features. I wonder if they will add a new plan at some point.

64 GB is just not enough space if you plan to use the camera a lot. I have a 2nd gen Pixel with 64 GB of space and I find myself running out of space often if I end up recording 4K video or enable RAW shots. Mind you, Pixel has unlimited full resolution storage with Google Photos so cloud storage is not an issue; but you need to be in good wifi to utilize that. While traveling, that might not be the case always.

I honestly think all these high end phones focused on camera, should at least start with 128 GB of space. OS and apps are big enough anyway.

I like how Samsung has stuck to its guns on some of the features that Apple and later others dropped, biggest being the external card support, dual sim support and audio jack. Only if they were not hell bent on adding their own customizations, I would have loved to try one.

If they had a 128GB option you could say the same thing about the lack of a 96GB option. There are hundreds of billions of potential storage sizes in this range. Apple has to be practical and choose some very small selection of storage options.

But who's classifying it as PRO? Professionals definitely aren't, and that's what matters. They aren't walking around with any phone as their main tool. Let Apple call their phones rocket ships if the name fits; astronauts won't care.

i'm inclined to believe that pro is aimed at people willing to drop a ton of money that think they're pro more than they actually do professional work, and that's sort of been a lot of apple's theme around their "pro" products regarding photography

It is just an upgrade to an existing lineup of Xs+Max, but with a reworked naming scheme (similar to iPad vs. iPad Pro). It is about as Pro as Xs+Max were.

Do you see a lot of artists using iPad Pro as their main tool? Me neither, but I do see a lot of them using it as their secondary tool that also doubles as a general-purpose personal computing device. Which is what, I feel, iPhone Pro lineup was made for.

Apple seems to keep 128 GB in reserve till the model drops to the base of the lineup. For example, the iPhone 8 is now available w/128GB at $499. Before today, it was available w/256 GB at $749. The 64 GB model dropped in price by $150 from $599 to $449.

Because the 128 a sweet spot and most people don't have a need for more. The 64 size is just enough to push most intensive users over the hump and in to iCloud subscriptions. I'm sure Apple has all the analytics on how much space is being used by their users and how much iCloud subscriptions would take a hit with an 128 offering.

People booed 2 years ago when they announced the price and they booed this year when they announced the Mac Pro pricing, You could hear it when they announced that expensive stand so that’s clearly not true.

The is pure speculation, but I think it could still hold true. Consider that many Apple employees aren't involved with every project, and Apple is known to heavily segment their developers.

So you might be an Apple Fan who happens to be an employee - except you work on idk iMessages or something - you might still be disappointed to see a 1000$ stand, especially from a company you work for.

Given it's a crowded room, I highly doubt employees would be reprimanded for just booing.

There were no previous generations of Pro iPhones. I get that these are replacing the XS and XS Max, but those were not designated Pro. When you put that label on, you have to give all of Pro devices storage to match.

I think you're reading way to into the naming scheme. They simply ran out of letters and went with Pro to designate the more expensive model. It's still a smartphone, it's not like there is a large market out there for people who make and edit feature films with phones.

I agree. I've been an Android user since 2009 iirc and never owned and iPhone, I am going to buy an iPhone as my next phone due to all the shenanigans Google is doing. Every damn Android phone I've bought lately has Facebook preinstalled, theres other things, but I'm done with it all.

The one thing that kills me about iPhones is the miniscule amount of storage I get. I dont want all my things in the cloud, the cloud is useless to me without access to internet. The cloud is only useful for long-term backup storage if anything.

My phone comes with 64GB and I'm using 58 of that data, I popped in a 64GB SIM card and I'm only using 12 probably cause I filled it up before and wanted to have room for more photos and stuff. I may well buy an iPhone but I want more storage space out of the box, not some cloud solution. It also annoys me that the Macbook Air starts out at 128GB, that gets eaten up so quickly as a developer.

I always loved LG and their G series of phones despite always bundling Facebook garbage, and this time around they added a button for Google Assistant. I disabled that button, too often would I accidentally press it and now my convos go off into the corporate cloud to be lost in who knows what state. Worse yet: I can't repurpose the button. I would love a "Skip Song" button on my phone for when I'm driving.

I am in the same boat. I have an S7 from one of the major carriers that came preinstalled with Facebook. You can disable it, but not uninstall. Also, there is an update to "Facebook Services" which I can't seem to find and disable. I absolutely will not get another phone from Samsung (or others) that comes with Facebook preinstalled.

FWIW, there are other people in the world beside you. And they have different needs and desires. I am one of those people. 64GB is perfect for me. I wouldn't upgrade to 128GB of storage even if it were available.

> FWIW, there are other people in the world beside you. And they have different needs and desires.

Which everyone supports, if there was a reasonably priced 128gb option for the Pro, the complaint wouldn't be as strong. But there isn't such an option. You either use 64, or at least 4x that much (which, after subtracting 14 from the OS, is actually 5x that much). That's just a pretty silly scale, not granular at all.

So you squeeze tons of consumers to take too little because they don't want to pay for a 5x jump when they need 2x, or squeeze them into doing just that and overpaying, or squeeze them into a cloud subscription. It's not matching the product to the needs in the way that they could.

There are three tiers. On the 11, the tiers are 64, 128, 256. On the Pro the tiers are 64, 256, 512. If you want to make an entry level model at 64gb, a top tier at 512gb, and one tier in the middle, then that's a logical way to step things up.

> So you squeeze tons of consumers to take too little because they don't want to pay for a 5x jump when they need 2x, or squeeze them into doing just that and overpaying, or squeeze them into a cloud subscription. It's not matching the product to the needs in the way that they could.

But this logic works the other way: if you only have a 128gb entry level model, then you are forcing consumers who only need 64gb to buy more storage than they need.

So your real gripe is that there isn't a 128gb tier in between the 64gb and 256gb. But the price difference between those tiers is only $150. So the 128gb tier would be something like $50 or $100 less than the 256gb tier. If your huge problem is that you have to pay an extra 5-10% of purchase price because their storage tiers don't perfectly align with your needs, then maybe you're not the target audience.

And 128gb is not some magic number. What about people who only need 300gb? Why should they be forced to pay for 512gb when they only need an additional 50gb on top of the 256gb? Because you have to split things up somehow, that's why. Things just didn't get split in a way that is convenient for you.

If they'd stuck everything in it you want and the base price was $1600 people would be complaining about that and it would be a brand shattering headline. Yes, they are marketing people; but they are balancing a lot of constraints -- a little engineers...

Only a small subset of the population has any lightning connectors at all. The present standard is usb-c. Using an out-of-date standard is worth booing. It's like if a monitor continued sticking with dvi and never made the move to displayport or hdmi or usb-c.

You must be living in an entirely different universe because everyone I know uses tons of usb-c all day.

How about the most popular noise cancelling headphones, the Sony 1000XM3 (usb-c). I see them everywhere.

Some laptops? More like all laptops. Find me one being sold now without usb-c. They would be a joke. The best tablet, the iPad Pro is usb-c (though yes I know the lower end ones are lightning).

What about the best video gear. All the best mirrorless video cameras like the Panasonic GH5, Sony A7iii, Nikon Z7, Fuji T-X3, BlackMagic Pocket Cinema Camera, all with usb-c. The best webcam out there, the Logitech Brio with usb-c.

Let's talk about specialty gear. The most popular external disk, Sandisk Portable Extreme with usb-c. The most popular mobile hotspot, the Nighthawk mobile router has usb-c. The most popular audio interface, Focusrite, uses usb-c pretty much for all their products now. The best presentation remote, the Logitech Spotlight is usb-c charging.

Me and my friends have flashlights, shavers, toothbrushes, VR headsets and remotes, all with usb-c. Great for travel.

Basically, any good product being released now is usb-c, and has been for the past couple years.

>I would say far more people have a lightning device than a USB-C device right now.

This seems funny since Android outsells Apple 4 to 1 and Windows outsells Apple 5 to 1, (and Android and Windows use USB-C for phones and laptops respectively). So quick math here would tell you that USB-C penetration is 4 to 5 times more broad than lightning based purely on sales.

EDIT: Also Apple uses USB-C on some laptops, so those numbers would affect it too

But that includes all Androids, for a very long time USB-C was only in the flagship Android phones and even today there are lots of low end Android phones being made that are Micro USB.
Plus, lightning has been out for 7 years in all of Apple's mobile products, while USB-C has only been semi-mainstream for 3-4 years.

If I had to rank connectors by how many devices use them it would probably be Micro USB - Lightning - USB-C

Edit: if we include laptops and other non-mobile devices, I would say that normal USB far surpasses everything else usage wise, USB-C seems to only be in the high end laptops and even then most laptops have some normal USB ports as well.

Excuse me? 64GB standard storage for a "PRO" labeled $1000 phone that extensively advertises its professional video capacity is not an arbitrary or personal definition of bad. It's objectively inferior to its competition. It's objectively the lowest storage space of any $1000+ phone on the market.

That you would conflate this discussion to think these are arbitrary opinions seems dishonest.

It seems like you accept predatory profit-driven business decisions as "status quo" even when competitors offer far better options. I don't get your definition of "status quo" when it's synonymous "worst in class".

The Galaxy Note 10 at $1000 comes standard with 256GB, an upgrade which makes the iPhone cost $1150.

But sure, "status quo", as long as the current state of the market and state of competition isn't considered...

For the first time ever I feel like I just wasted my time watching an Apple product announcement. I'm not saying those products are bad or are poorly engineered or anything like that. I'm just saying the products they showed off today aren't anything I would want.

I have an iPhone 7 Plus and comparing it to the iPhone 11 versions I don't see anything in the latter that I'd upgrade for. The best I could come up with would maybe be the watch but that's only because I have a Series 1 that is probably on its last legs. If I'm being honest, however, when the Series 1 goes I'll probably go back to my $30 Timex. $5/mo for Arcade and TV+ each is a great price but then again, at least for the latter, I'd be paying a little over a third of the price of Netflix for a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the content. Sure they'll be adding more but nothing they have now really gets me excited to watch.

I used to so look forward to product announcements because it was like being a kid again. Looking through the Christmas catalog at all the things I'd love to have. Imagining how my life might be better "if I just had that new iPhone!" Now? Meh.

I can't believe we don't have higher refresh rates on iPhones yet. Apple got user experience with touch screens better then anyone else when the iPhone originally launched. Apple brought it to iPad, i'd like to see it in iPhone.

It's a "nice to have" feature. The problem, I think, is that the 11 Pro still has its very high asking price and is missing a bunch of "nice to haves". Things I was hoping for:

- USB-C charging

- 5G (for futureproofing, more than anything)

- High refresh rate screen

- Refreshed/less dated looking design (that notch has aged very poorly, regardless of the tech they squeeze into it)

- Larger default storage

- No touch ID/in screen fingerprint reader

None of those missing features are deal breakers, but without all of them it makes this phone seem iterative and a difficult sell - especially since it seems likely/is rumoured that a lot of them will come next year.

They've said for a while that 5G wasn't coming to this generation. I think it's good they left it off. Apple doesn't bring in halfbaked features. They wait for the technology to be stable.

5G is far from that. It requires reworked battery technology, antenna systems, and we don't even have a complete picture of the effects on our health. The phones that have 5G currently have terrible battery life and are hundreds of dollars more expensive than their non-5G counterparts. All for the 20 or so cities that have it.

Once the technology is actually ready for primetime, Apple will include it. And it will work way better than anything you're seeing right now.

Would 90hz use more battery? When they talked about the always-on watch screen, I think one of the things they said was it slowed down its refresh rate to 1 hz. I don't know anything about if that saves power, but maybe?

I honestly can't put my finger on it. All those features you listed are great but none of them make me WANT that device. I used to want the new product they announced as soon as they showed it off. Maybe when I hold one in my hands that will change.

I somewhat have to agree on the "I used to want the new product as soon as it was shown off" bit. I mean to be clear there are some nice improvements on the iPhone, and it packs a hell of a punch compared to previous versions.

For me, it was how the announcements were made, they did seem to just feel like they had a massive "Wow" factor.

Even way back on the first iPhone announcement - When Steve was on stage and talking about the Palm and Blackberry devices having "physical keyboards", and that he had merged it all with the iPod with touch screens, to me that seemed like a massive jump. (OK I admit, at the time I was very much in the camp of "my Blackberry's keyboard is the finest!", but I watch the announcement back again... there was a very Steve Jobs finesse to the whole thing!).

The more recent announcements have kinda been a bit "meh", and I think maybe it's just that - I think a new type of device that has not been thought about, would bring back the "Wow" factor again.

I think, just for me anyway, that jumping over the releases (so skip a release and upgrade), I see more of a jump, than say if I was going between each version.

Anyway, my thoughts - and I don't know - maybe others see the same with the announcements not quite as they used to be - due to the slowness of "upgrades" to the product.

I have to agree. The upgraded camera is enough to get me to want to switch, but the keynote itself was rather dull. I generally enjoy the Apple launch events, but they’ve been sliding lately and this just made me feel “that was a waste of time to watch”.

Now (or at least for now) the changes have become more iterative. The delta between several generations are still nice, but between individual generations are less enticing to immediately upgrade.

In the end this is not bad. Upgrading a still perfectly working product every 1 or 2 years is quite insane and taxing for the environment. A lot of credit should go to Apple for maintaining iOS support for old iPhones. This makes it possible for people to keep their phones longer or hand them down. Or for people with lower incomes to buy older generations and still get upgrades.

Of course, slower upgrade cycles are bad for manufacturers. So it's smart of Apple to increase revenue through services (Apple Music, Arcade, Apple TV+, iCloud Storage), rather than forcing their customers to upgrade perfectly-fine devices.

I can put my finger on it, literally, I love the fingerprint sensor for Apple Pay. I see my wife trying to use face-id for it and it seems very convoluted. Until someone shows me a simple a gesture as holding out my phone with my thumb on the fingerprint sensor, I don't have any want for a replacement for my 8.

I still have an iPhone 7 so I am in the same boat as you, but don't you just double tap the power button for Apple Pay on FaceID devices? That's the same way you do it with TouchID, except you are using a different button.

I just know that when I place my phone next to the payment sensor, the phone switches to "pay mode". So if my thumb is there, the action is just put phone next to sensor, put thumb on fingerprint, in one fluid motion. For my wife there's this, place phone next to sensor, lift phone up to look at it, then put it back down. Often times lifting it up causes the payment system to timeout.

Perhaps there's a smoother motion, double clicking, then face-id then press. To me, the finger print sensor just means I'm tapping my phone on the sensor.

The problem is that the improvement of the first iPhone compared to what came before was like 1/x where x is a very small, close to zero number, while the subsequent releases are like 8/7 or 6/5. And to top it off they cost over $1k, which makes it a hard sell for me.

The rumored folding iPhone would have been the wow-factor even if Samsung failed already in their first attempt. I'm not sure how it makes sense for someone to ask people what they would have been looking for to make the announcement worthwhile. Are you hiring?

"People don’t know what they want until you show it to them."
-Steve Jobs

This is exactly the case for me too, I love my 6S+. My only problem is that the battery is starting to die. Now I would just replace the battery and stick with it but some years ago I dropped the phone and the screen shattered.

You can't see the cracks in normal head on operation and there are no usage issues but I think it would mean that I'd have to have the screen replaced to replace the battery. At some point this is not economically good sense.

I can easily afford an new iPhone every year but I want a headphone socket for use with Rosetta Stone. When I use my headphones wirelessly with it it switches to a headset profile (with an annoying beep) and the sound quality drop to that of a headset before it switch back to audio profile (with another annoying beep).

Apple's solutions things like audio in the new iPhones seems half baked. Using a 3.5mm headphone lead with the same Bose QC35s everything works perfectly with clear sound at all times.

Also FaceId won't work when sitting in the charging cubbyhole of my car, TouchId does.

Same phone here, for the same reasons. It still does everything I want, as quickly as I want. It’s actually a little mind boggling to me that they have nearly doubled the version number without adding anything at all that I find compelling.

The cost of going from a 6 year upgrade cycle to a 5 year upgrade cycle is something like 12 cents per day. Even if you're not entirely happy with the current phones, at some point waiting to upgrade is a net negative if you actually cost it out and compare it rationally to your utility curve.

Its 2019 and Apple is still milking their largest subset of buyers on the Lightning tax. In my opinion Apple has some fantastic engineering still happening but the blatant disregard of USB-C shows the true motives. While I understand there are likely challenges with switching the iPhone Pro doesn't fit, at all, with the connectivity solutions in the MacBook Pro or iPad Pro line. Its really unfortunate a lot of what Apple showed today are derivatives of things Android manufacturers have been doing for years. Then again there's nothing to be upset about, the majority of this was public for quite a while.

Keep in mind USB-C came to Android on the Nexus line in October of 2015.

The thing is a lot of Apple product owners have a lot of Lightning cables and chargers already. For them, they're not paying any sort of tax. Changing to USB-C would be a tax for these people as they'd have to buy all new cables.

Yes, in a tech forum the majority of us have many USB-C devices. But I personally don't have that critical mass of USB-C devices compared with Lightning or microUSB.

Every device I've bought in the last couple of years has USB-C. Most devices powered externally today, in the tech field have gone to USB-C. I'm not sure what airports you traverse but I've yet to be in an airport in the last two years that doesn't sell some sort of USB-C charger. That and since most all of my devices charge via that method that's what I mainly carry.

What I mean by Lightning tax is the literal Lightning tax. Lightning is a proprietary connector that needs to be licensed by Apple and of which Apple makes revenue from. [0] So by Apple keeping it around on their flagship device Apple continues to profit from accessories continuing to be made.

I'm curious why you think it's great for Apple buyers that tote MacBook Pro, iPad Pro and iPhone to need two types of cable for charging and connectivity?

Remember FireWire? It was great for it's time but saw it's day well before Apple finally dropped it. Lightning has seen it's fate. A flagship phone, with the price Apple commands, should have a current generation port.

I’ve had phones with microUSB, USB-C and Lightning within the past 5 years. Oddly enough I still have a few things which take a microUSB cable including a book light.

At the end of the day, having different cables is a slight inconvenience but not terrible. I know with both USB-C and Lightning I’m tired of cleaning the connectors. I’m not going to say I want them to go away, but Qi charging ftw! Renders this entire debate almost entirely moot, and lint isn’t an issue.

Replacing one annoying connector with another isn’t an upgrade, it’s a lateral move at best, and a downgrade for people with iPhones today that are well invested in Lightning peripherals.

USB-C is on its best day, equal to Lightning for the purposes of shifting electrons, and is in some ways worse because the design of the connector is more fragile on the female end, I.e. the phone, rather than the more easily replaced cable. The day Apple switches over to USB-C is the day the connector is meaningless. It will probably happen, but today is not that day.

Careful what you whish for. I can totally understand the desire for uniform and interchangable power adaptors and ports, but USB-C on my S8 wore off within half a year, to the point that to "take" and speed-load, I had to ram it into the plug several times in succession, greatly contributing to wear.

The thing I was 100% hoping for but did not expect at all was a new haptic feedback engine. I think the next big thing Apple could improve would be localized feedback. I want to be able to feel a button when I drag a finger across the screen, for example.

There were zero rumors of this, it was just wishful thinking, but man if I didn't dream...

Perhaps it was horrible, but it allowed me to jump directly into specific features of an app. With only a bit of practice. Now you need to wait for the long press or first start the app and something. Sending a message or mail to favourites now became slower.

Is there any use case where WiFi + Bluetooth hotspot makes more sense than enabling each separately. Bluetooth is a huge battery drain. To avoid this as it is now, I have to select Wifi + Bluetooh, wait for my device to connect via WiFi then go back to settings and disable bluetooth. If I forgot to do so, my battery is gone in a few hours.

With battery life being such a priority, I'm genuinely puzzled as to why this hasn't already been implemented.

I actually don't want an edge-to-edge screen or FaceID, though, and 5S is already a bit bigger than I'd like. So no, it's not a clear upgrade. I'd probably grin and bear it, but it does feel like people don't sell phone's I'd actually like anymore.

By all accounts the phones are amazing and the new video shooting modes are a big step forward. That said after going back to the iPhone se recently I realise that it's the sweet spot phone for me. It does everything I want my phone to do and doesn't feel bloated by loads of amazing tech I'll never use once the novelty wears off.

Biggest asks for me are putting back touch ID (ideally under screen but on back is fine too), headphone jack, removing the notch, installing custom APKs. They have the means to do all of these things, but don't for ideological reasons that only they seem to hold.

- some type of integrated headset or device to use the new iPhone as a VR/AR headset

- Better battery life. I know they announced this, but the batteries need to be 10-100x better. I can’t use my phone all day without it dying. I should be able to use it for a week without dying

Thought of a few more that would have been good:

- a flip phone option, something really innovative (not a joke)

- a much smaller version of the iPhone. Like an iPhone nano

- a gaming version of the iPhone that had a gpu and could run steam

I know some of these sound like science fiction, but that’s kind of the point for Apple events. The iPod, iPhone, and iPad were all next level. What have we gotten from Apple in the last 5 years? Headphones? A notification machine for your wrist?

An iPhone with removable handlebars that can transform into a PSP (with paddles, buttons and joysticks) and play games of similar quality to the Switch. The handlebars should be wireless so I can play games with my friends. I should be able to use Apple TV or screen mirror to transfer the games to the TV or to a projector or wireless to any display really.

My friends with regular iPhones should be able to stream the games I’m playing if I give them permission, and if we’re in the same room we should be able to play party games easily with less resource intensive (ie score displays or trivia questions or whatever) able to be displayed on their devices. Or they should be able to use their iPhones as 3rd or 4th or ... Nth touch screen virtual controllers for multiplayer.

Because it’s a phone, it has a touchscreen for super fast data entry of my online accounts or whatever, 4G and awesome cameras, gyro and accelerometer as well.

That is the only thing I want; sure there are good feature phones (I never use my iPhone for normal cellular calling) that have long battery life, but I want a high spec smart phone with at least 1 whole day (let’s say 24 hrs; when travelling, and that is often, I usually spend whole days working only on my phone; browsing,
dictating, writing and doing conference calls; it is just empty after half a day like that) while using it the entire day. I do not need it to be so thin; I need it to last all day while using it with screen and 4g on.

I even tried out Oukitel monster phones; the k10000 first version actually made this but was bad otherwise (way too heavy, any kind of drop would shatter the screen; not very good specs besides the battery) while the next version did not make it (really cannot understand why).

So with my 7 plus I now carry an external battery and am contemplating the Chinese approach to battery life; carry 2 phones instead. I really wish they could fix this.

The watch helps when not travelling; it allows me to leave my phone off for long stretches but it it not an ideal solution.

> iPhone nano

I did not try the latest watches but do they not have a SIM and basically are a tiny iPhone?

A lot of that is just technological maturity, I think. When smartphones first arrived, there were many, many, obvious upgrades that would make the experience better for the user of the device.

This is the golden age of any technology; the lack of something great, and seeing it approach from the horizon, then repeating with the next thing.

Smartphones definitely seem to be converging on a form factor and a feature set. This is what happened to "feature" phones that we all had just before the smartphone became available. Do you remember any features you were dying to have in your next flip-phone? I don't. They had matured.

What will happen after smartphones? It's anyone's guess, and I'd say that whoever is going to invent that new device already has the idea and is trying to get it developed.

For me, it would be the phone replacing my laptop and tablet with docking stations or foldable screens and adaptative OS (like Samsung Dex). Phones are powerful enough to do that.
I also imagined a portable docking station with just a screen, maybe some battery and something to attach your phone to transform into a tablet.

The main reason is that I don't like managing different devices, installing different apps, using different OS, I just want to customize my working environment once.

That or having a single OS that works on different devices and synchronizes cleverly every settings, installed apps configuration in the cloud and adapt them to the device.

Since you're on an iPhone 7: The jump to FaceID and home-buttonless UI is actually probably bigger than you think. The jump from 7 to X/XR/11 is going to be much bigger than, say, 7 to 8.

By removing the home button, Apple turned iPhone into a device completely controlled by gestures. It's arguably the biggest UX change since the first iPhone, and one that was surprisingly unreported at the time. It makes the phone feel more cohesive, and the initial impression, once you learn the app switching gestures, is vaguely futuristic. FaceID works great, too, and certainly feels futuristic, though on its own it's not really a game changer. It's the integration into the buttonless UX that makes it a worthwhile feature.

(I actually wish there was also a fingerprint sensor, because the FaceID doesn't work well for contactless terminal such as the ones you find in stores -- you have to first hold the phone near the reader, then pick a card, then hold the phone at the right angle for it to recognize your face, then bring it back to the reader. Not ideal, though someone claimed the new phones would do FaceID at steeper angles, so maybe it's gotten better.)

Interesting, I thought I'd tried that before and it didn't work because it wasn't near a reader. I'll try again, thanks!

I'd argue that it's still a slightly more complicated interaction than with TouchID, though, requiring a bit more mental preparation, perhaps.

As for TouchID: Yes, that's how it works. It's a more fluid action because typically you'll have added your thumb as the fingerprint, and it's easy to hold the phone with your thumb on the home button while holding it near the reader.

I wholeheartedly agree. Their problem is in multiple areas: product, design, and presentation.

First and most noticeably they no long have a "master of ceremony" someone that is not only excited by the products but also enthusiastic to show them off to you. This is exemplified with no more "One More thing..."

Second, their designs are old and tired. I don't know if Ive ran out of Braun/Rams designs to borrow from or if the execs fear any major design changes, but Apple has become too comfortable with their design language and unfortunately they are starting to show a lack of taste (looking at you over-sized camera bump)

Third, the products have matured. Apple hasn't really done anything new or exciting with their lineup. Gone are the days you expected to see a new product that is lifestyle changing. Now days you might see a spec bump, or a change in product to make it thinner, but nothing that really stands out as "Wow I've gotta have that". The thing I remember most from the last two announcements were features targeting "influencers" - Animoji's and "Slofies".

Finally, I don't feel apple understands the waning in their product appeal. Be it on price or function, I see a lot less Apple products at coffee shops and colleges these days.

This never happened to you with the past few presentations? I basically haven't seen a new feature I genuinely need since the iPhone 6 (or whatever Mac/iPad was announced since then, for that matter).

Smartphones are pretty much done. The one thing I'd upgrade for is apparently not possible with current technology: A display that works perfectly in sunlight, being illuminated by it instead of trying to compete with it. Other than that? I can't even think of something!

I would give my left arm for an e-ink phone that had Google Assistant or Siri for navigation, and worked with Android Auto / Carplay, an awesome email client, some chat apps, and a good keyboard.

It'd be much easier to use my phone for what I want to use my phone for -- productivity and being connected (and occasionally looking things up online). Instead, my phone successfully hypnotizes me with it's bright colors and videos. More and more, I find myself using my phone not because I actually want to, but because it sneak attacked me with some notification that sucked me into doing something that's just wasting my time.

Also, with e-ink, the battery should last at least a couple of days. And, to your point, you could use it under any lighting conditions -- at least I can with my Kindle Paperwhite.

It doesn't help that they have clearly filled the audience with Apple employees who were instructed to whoop and holler and when to do it. I understand the motivations for doing so. A product announcement like this would otherwise be attended by a majority surly journalists, too busy taking notes to exhibit much excitement. But at this point, the whooping and hollering come across as extremely fake--too much so for a company like Apple, in my opinion. I think I'd rather the employees just clap. At least during WWDC there are genuine fans in the audience.

I don't know whether the applause is some kind of fake/contrived strategy. Maybe it is. But I am sure the launch is an exciting day for everyone at Apple. The employees in the audience have spent the past year(s) working on this stuff, and are finally getting to see the result. They're seeing their work in the spotlight, surrounded by the press. Wouldn't you feel special and give a hoot when your little contribution gets a shout out?

I suspect their strategy of rolling out a different speaker every 10 sentences might be an attempt at scouting for execs who can excite an audience. To whatever degree Apple is exciting anymore, that is.

I'm always wondering what people expect from those "Apple Keynote". Is anyone actually watching Keynotes from other companies? Samsung, LG, Volkswagen or any large companies in the world? No, they don't because it is boring and made with medias as target audience.

I never understood the need for so many people to tune into those Apple live keynotes. It is of course all marketing and slideware.

Maybe that era is one where we could expect major, groundbreaking changes every few years in hardware?

I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing that today’s hardware is not changing as fast as it was 10 years ago (or even 5 years ago).

Looking at the quality and size of devices now, I can’t imagine much will be different in 15 years until we get to a major re-invention of things; I.e. holographic devices or implanted smartphones, things that you dream about. The screen quality is just so great already that I can’t imagine it being 1000x better - like you might compare an iPhone to a mid-90s gameboy screen or early Nokia candy-bar phone displays & UI.

What can we possibly expect from new devices besides more storage, slightly more pixels, and slightly more powerful processing?

I sort of feel like this, but chalk it up to me getting old and curmudgeonly. You kids with your fancy three cameras and gamey movie thingy, get off my lawn. Back in my day we had a phone with a browser and email and Netflix and were happy about it.

Get an iPhone 8 instead, probably the best value out there for iPhones.

If you are worried about shelling out money, remember that an iPhone 8 isn't $449, it's $449 minus whatever you sell it for in a year (probably not much less). And it's even less if you just buy it used or Apple refurbished in the first place.

The iPhone SE works fine but the screen size is too small for many apps that get scrunched up pretty badly. You’re using a screen size that a very small fraction of Apple users are still using, which means app developers don’t care to make it work nicely for you.

The camera is bad by modern standards, I can see a big difference even for small 4x6 prints, and Touch ID is the slower 1st generation. It's just really old hardware all around.

On the plus side, it has good battery life, a headphone jack, and it's still an iPhone running full iOS.

In addition to Dangus' comment with iPhone 8 you'll also get the same CPU that powers the iPhone X, which will be more than fine for quite a few more years. Furthermore I'm confident it will be supported with major software updates for a long time. It is the sweet spot for customers on a low budget or looking for a small phone. The iPhone SE, as much as I like to form factor, isn't a good new purchase at this point.

My understanding is that the iPhone 7 has a few more common hardware issues than the iPhone 8. Apparently a lot of iPhone 7 models are affected by messed up speakers and mics, the audio IC defect. Kind of an important feature.

I’ll admit that’s a pretty big price difference but I wonder if that has to do with the 7’s hardware issues making it a phone to stay away from. Or maybe it’s just old and that’s why it’s cheap.

I had to replace my SE battery earlier this year (well, I didn't absolutely need to, I did it because I intend to get another two years out if it). Otherwise mine is still chugging along perfectly well.

Software wise it's a perfectly fine device, definitely some limitations, but only because the processor is a four+ year old design. Some SPA or otherwise heavy webpages cause it to choke (ex: it hates USAToday), but 99% of what I try to do works great. Per Apple and MacRumours, the SE will get iOS 13. No idea how well that will run, but we'll see.

If you can get one in good shape to hold you over you'll probably be happy with it.

Yeah I replaced mine at the Apple Store this year (Apple covered it). Now I get well over a day's battery on it, amazing. Granted, I intentionally avoid installing hefty apps so that would also help achieve this kind of battery life.

Judging from other responses here I am in the minority, but I like the camera bump design. The triangular geometry makes sense if you want to have all sensors equidistant to a central point. This also may result in some simplifications (or even optimizations) in sensor fusion algorithms. Putting three cameras in a line makes less sense to me.

I don't think we're arguing the functionality of the design; this is purely based on the phone's aesthetics. (And, for those of us with trypophobia, our opinion on the design is likely due to a deeply rooted instinctual and evolutionary reaction.)

Some studies show that as much as 16% of people experience some level of trypophobia... My spouse has it pretty bad and confirmed it triggers her. Even to me there's something a little disturbing about it.

In fairness they did incremental upgrades 2 years in a row, which they didn't used to do. But yeah, cycles are naturally slowing. Supposedly they have big things coming in 2020; USB-C, a whole new redesign, etc. I'll still probably stick with my XS, though.

USB-C is just my personal guess. It's been such a glaring, weird omission for years, and between the 11's lightning-to-C cable and the prospect of a redesign, 2020 seems like the perfect opportunity to finally do it.

- 30% faster FaceID (I don't know how slow the previous one was, but I know the speed difference between the TouchID on my iPad Mini 3 and my iPhone 7 makes me love it on the latter and never use it on the former)

Dual SIM came last year, and the 2000000:1 contrast ratio came in 2017. Aside from the third camera, the rest of these really are incremental improvements rather than new features.

I don't think that is a problem mind you. Lots of manufacturers are flinging shit at the wall trying to find the Next Big Thing(TM) in smartphones. I don't think it's going to happen any time soon. Smartphones in general have gotten incredibly good in the last 4-5 years.

What so exciting here? It's OLED. They all have that kind of contrast ratio. The huge number was just mentioned for marketing sake. Your eyes won't know the difference between 200000, 2000000 or Infinity.

Contrast ratio is just the comparison between the brightest white and the darkest black. All OLED, by virtue of having pure black darks, have infinite contrast ratio. Doesn't matter if it's a good OLED or a shitty one, they all universally have perfect contrast ratio.

They got used to dual sim in android devices. There are multiple use cases like keeping one number for office and can turn it off after office hours and another sim for personal life all in one device. Another use is have data plan in a cheaper provider and voice with another with better reliability or coverage etc, yet another is have a sim with international roaming or local one without using a separate phone when traveling!

People say they expect more, but what, exactly? Do people still expect more from a laptop? They're laptops - they've not changed in 15 years. They just get faster, smaller and more easy to break. Phones have caught up. Nothings happening except more megapixels, plus slightly faster CPUs so..i dunno...snapchat loads faster or whatever, or more lenses or whatever, plus the sort of twilight zone $999 = £1049 pricing in the UK. Expect less, from now on, or you'll be disappointed.

Agreed. At this point the iPhone is basically a slab of glass. The are not many form factor changes to be made except the further shrinking of bezels and the notch. They could swap the back materials or flatten the sides like the iPhone 4, but that's just change to change.

IMO, +4 hours of batter life on the new Pro is a huge deal. Every person I know carries around portable battery packs and is always stressing over battery life. Adding 4 hours (even if it ends up only being 2 in real world) is a bigger deal than probably even the cameras.

> At this point the iPhone is basically a slab of glass. The are not many form factor changes to be made except the further shrinking of bezels and the notch.

You're thinking of that backwards, I think. You don't change the hardware first. You come up with some new software (an OS feature; a library) that requires hardware that isn't already in the phone, and then redesign the phone to fit that new hardware in there. Like with the face sensors, or the ML-model-running cores. The hardware is designed, certainly, but it's designed as an answer to a constraint-satisfaction problem (i.e. a checklist of everything the new model needs to have/do), and big changes in the offered solution only happen when there are big changes in the constraints.

That being said, Apple seems to be lacking, lately, in inventing (or acquiring!) the kind of software features that necessitate new hardware. They're not even first to the Night Mode thing, which would totally have been one of their type of differentiators just a few years ago. Have they lost some critical software-R&D talent or something?

I agree with the OP, there’s only so much you can do with a phone, camera and battery life are one of the remaining things left with scope to improve. Apple are broadening as a company and the iPhone alone doesn’t define them anymore, that coupled with people holding on to phones for longer means innovation will die down.

I don't know about "people," but for one thing they only mentioned privacy in passing. Or how about IOS improvements? The world is probably waiting for ways not to have to touch the screen so much, and in a finger-mouse style. Let's see some cutting edge HCI.

I don’t know what the hell is going on here. Usually the lack of VAT in US prices explains weird conversions, but even factoring that in it comes to £970. Keeping it at £999 would be fine; to put it up by 50 quid is some serious bullshit.

Pound hit a low of 1.1959 a week ago, and The Telegraph noted "there is a risk of sterling falling further"[1]. Taking that price gives £1002.42 ((999/1.1959)*1.2), and pricing in a potential drop doesn't seem totally unreasonable.

It’s not just about exchange rate. The cost of doing business in Europe is generally higher than in the USA. Higher taxes, more consumer protections, more employee rights, cost of localization, smaller economies of scale, countless other differences... these all add up to Apple having higher costs in the UK.

It’s not just Apple. Take a look at how AWS prices vary by region for another tech example.

If the iPhone 6-8 and now the X/XS/11 are anything to go by then I think the days of the tick-tock refreshes are over.

Apple has made it pretty clear they don’t see upgrading their phones every 1-2 years anymore. Personally if my iPhone 7+ hadn’t gone and bricked itself I wouldn’t have bothered trading it in (after replacement under warranty) for the XS. My wife is still rocking an iPhone 7 and I see no reason to upgrade it either. Never in my life until the year before last have I been satisfied to just hold onto a phone, especially after my contract or payment plan has ended.

This is the new “normal”, and everyone except the most enthusiastic of enthusiasts are going to bother buying a new phone more than every 3+ years.

It's exactly like the laptop and desktop refreshes. Nobody who bought a 2016 MacBook Pro has any business buying the 2019 model. The performance gain and overall differences are far too slight for that to matter.

But that doesn't mean you just stop updating your products every year.

> Apple is on a 3 year cycle now, probably to help accelerate development on their AR project.

If Apple has made that decision then there's a context which isn't generally appreciated. It's not just that you've stopped buying new phones so Apple needs something else to sell you: it's that AR/VR is more or less inevitably the future mainstream interface of mobile computing. The box-with-a-screen-on-the-side physical UI has hit its limits (this is Amdahl's Law of Mobile UI ;) ), which is also why there's so much interest in trying to make folding screens work.

at least usb 3.0 transfer speed for transferring all those gigabytes of movies because pros won't be editing those on a phone. User would also enjoy faster backups and syncs. Computer vision dev would enjoy streaming video feed realtime with low latency and prototyping algorithm on desktop. One generation of iPad Pro already had usb 3.0 even with lightning connector so I don't see a reason not to get it even if we cannot have usb-c yet in iphones. Even raspberry pi 4 has usb 3.0 - spec that has been realeased in 2010.

but this really was the least exciting iphone keynote ever, which was totally expected, but still disappointing. none of the more interesting rumors came about, like ultra-wideband positioning* and apple tags.

apple product cycles have lengthened, so this was inevitably going to be a lower-the-base-price and harvest-the-late-adopters year for the notch model era. i think apple may even keep the same style next year to introduce 5g (to reduce additional manufacturing challenges) and settle into a 4-year cycle so they can really milk the capex (which is what happened to macbook pros as the product line matured).

i’m still happily using my 6s.

* edit: apparently i missed the part where they talked about the U1 chip in the new iphones, which does the UWB positioning.

But good for users. We will not generate too much electronic waste. Will save money and when finally when their is actually a time to upgrade due to actual hardware degradation, You can get nice bump in hardware spec.

Not disputing that apple doesn’t “use 100% recycled materials” now (that would be virtually impossible), but the plastic recycling figure is also not saying much about e-waste from iPhones either. How much plastic is even used making an iPhone? I would be surprised if it’s more than 10%. Recycling figures for aluminum, stainless steel, glass, battery chemicals, and the expensive metals such as gold and silver used in phones are probably close to 100%. If the ‘24 different grades of plastic’ include the materials used for the (tiny) PCB in an iPhone, not much is left that is not recycled.

On a side note, I would like to see some figures how much energy and materials are actually spent when replacing something like a phone, compared to things like driving to work each day, running the AC for 12+ hours a day, flying around the globe once or twice a year or eating meat and dairy products every day of the week. I would be surprised if it’s even remotely significant compared to these things (yes this is a cynical and not very constructive argument to make, but perfectly rational)

Just because you send something off to be recycled doesn't mean it actually ends up being recycled. It's much better off to not have to recycle in the first place at all (eg. by making your hardware easy to repair, which Apple is notoriously bad at).

A week ago we discussed Om Malik's article "Camera sales are falling sharply". I am one of those people who now does not upgrade his camera, nor use it any more, as much as I like it. I use my smartphone, albeit with some aftermarket Moment wide- and fish-eye lenses on it.

This phone makes total sense to me. The money I used to spend on cameras and lenses will be captured by the smartphone companies.

Well, for the casual user i agree, but wasn't that the case for a long time already? If you try shooting something that is quite far away or lightning conditions not optimal, a proper camera is still on a different level than any smartphone camera.

These threads always seem to miss the point. It's not about the specs, it never was, and never will be.

Apple builds, or at least tries to build, seamless experiences. It's the reason there's limited hardware, excellent software support for past versions, and a creeping product line to extend to every device you come into contact with.

The demos showcase cool specs and features, but that is not where the value lies -- it lies in integration, cohesive experience and vendor lockin.

They're pushing out decent new revisions of the phone, but the creative push is going at integration(or should be!).

If I was Apple, I'd be aggressively funding R&D, building out a low cost, separate brand (to funnel India, Africa, into Apple devices over the next ~30 years), and spending everything else on beautiful, perfect integration, and maybe fixing up the Mac line.

Sell the privacy aspect hard, sell the integration even harder, and no competitor will ever unseat you.

Apple knew it back in 2017 and as each year progresses it’s becoming increasingly clear we have exited the innovation phase and are well into the saturated/sustained phone market. We will never see an iPhone announcement quite like the first 5 and the X. Short of a form factor change, our phones will last longer and the new phone feature list will decrease year over year.

Also - the Pros are thicker, heavier, and slightly taller and wider than the X and XS. Couple months ago someone linked to an article on how much bigger iPhones are getting and this year continued that trend.

People have complained for years about battery life. So Apple finally increases the battery slightly, and now I see people complaining about the weight. I understand now why Apple has resisted this for so long.

I’m not complaining. If anything, I think Apple has actually listened to all the complaints of battery life and reacted in a rather significant way. For example, the SoC discussion today highlighted the extensive work done to race to 0 and how significant that affects the Pro’s battery life. Each generation gets thicker, and in return we’re seeing some of the best battery life ever. These phones will last for years I dont think anyone investing >$700 in these has an issue with that

Today made me think about the launch of the X. I think Apple knocked it out of the park with the X, I bought it because I was due a new phone and have been pleasantly surprised/amazed by how they got pretty much everything right “first time”, so to speak.

Given they’ve done it 2 or 3 times, it’s not beyond Apple to produce another amazing phone down the line.

I love the SE because it has style, unlike every other later iPhone. I stopped using it because system font size of 9.3pt is too small to read without glasses. Apart from being unreadable it was great for form factor, battery life.

Apple is now in classic enterprise survival mode churning out incremental stuff. Their innovation is in hardware - i really long for them to bring some innovation to the user experience.

That said peeps should not reach too much into comments by HN folks about not liking ifobs....those devices are built for teenagers and people who want something that "just works". They dont want to mess with stuff under the hood and that is why iPhone and IOS now is as exciting as a bar of soap. Android on the other hand is a playground for folks who like to tinker, myself included.

Apple have nailed their market with perfection. I just hope that some people inside of Apple are working on something truly innovative for the future.

And onto why they canned the SE.....

The supply chain overhead of carrying and manufacturing a device which uses different tech is enormous. It can be almost as much as a seperate line of business - and that applies to not only Apple but also its component suppliers. If the business isnt big enough then it should be cut at some point. Given the FOMO around consumers using Apple and its software the SE became a niche device. It can have the 8/X/11 innards shoehorned in - everything, and my everything would need to be redesigned from scratch and one can imagine the cost of doing that and bringing to market. So i understand Apple's move from a commercial point of view. Very sad to see the brand axing the ONLY mobile product that had some sense of style and uniquess. The iFobs they now make are just boring. I much prefer Xiaomi because i get more phone for 20% of the price.

At our house, because I like new gadgets and my wife doesn't care, I have typically gotten a new phone every 2 years, and handed my old one to her to use for 2 more.

Then we fucked up the supply chain by breaking two phones in fairly quick succession. :( She's on a 6S, and I have an 8. Both are about 2 years old now.

I love to shift to FaceID on a X-style phone, and I'm a big amateur photographer, so holy crap the photo magic in the 11 Pro is SERIOUSLY tempting even though, at this point, there's absolutely nothing wrong with my 8 aside from the lack of FaceID.

Affording it isn't an issue. I've just finally gotten old enough that "new gadget" isn't quite the slam-dunk idea it once was. LOL. OTOH, reloading the supply line with staggered phones is probably not a terrible idea...

I have an iPhone XS Max. FaceID is nice. The camera is good, no question. It is enough for me and for most people. But don't buy too much into the shit Apple tells about their cameras.

After I got the XS Max a year ago, I was seriously unimpressed. They overpromised and underdelivered on the capabilities of the camera. Don't get me wrong. It's a good camera, probably the best in a phone, but boy, the "magical" portrait mode has its glitches. In 10-20% of the portrait photos, the camera/software has trouble detecting what's in the background and what not. Studio lighting sounds impressive, but I honestly never use it. It looks too artificial for my taste.

Sure thing, you can get decent photos with the iPhone XS Max, but the improvement compared to an iPhone 8 is a LOT less than what Apple says it is.

I guess I would be more impressed if they didn't frame it as some "camera that pro's use instead of their DSLR" or whatever they said in the marketing campaign.

"But don't buy too much into the shit Apple tells about their cameras."

I guess I don't know what that means. Any statement by a manufacturer is self-serving and should generally be taken with lots of salt.

3rd party reviews from trusted sites are more useful.

"Don't get me wrong. It's a good camera, probably the best in a phone"

So bugs exist but it's still "probably the best in a phone?" What's the issue, then?

"didn't frame it as some "camera that pro's use instead of their DSLR" or whatever they said in the marketing campaign"

Have they actually suggested that there exists any real pattern of professionals -- who, above all, tend to shoot in camera RAW, which Apple obscures in iOS -- using iPhones in lieu of full-frame DSLR or mirrorless bodies? Because I sure haven't seen it.

A modern, higher end smartphone is probably a better camera than any fixed-lens option from 3-5 years ago. And, increasingly, that means it's plenty enough camera for most people. But it's nowhere nearly as capable as my Sony.

OTOH, I've seen shots with the X and later iterations (by humans I know, not a marketing department) that were genuinely better, to my eye, than what I get out of my 8. That's appealing.

The other factor for us is the continued existence of the 6S in our family.

The 8's camera is materially better than the one in my wife's 6S, and this matters since we both take pics of friends and family and vacations. Moving her to the 8 and me to an 11 Pro would mean a net uptick in group photo quality. Win!

Disappointed that there wasn't really a true breakout feature I guess they're still doing the s-cadence even if they got rid of the name.

I'm still rocking a 6s and I'm gonna keep it for the next year I guess, more battery life is nice but can't swing $999 for 4 more hours of battery life. Here's hoping 128gb is standard next year (I currently have the 128gb 6s which was the most expensive at the time).

I also have an 6s. Haven't found much reason to upgrade. I like the smaller form factor. I guess upgrading to the 7 or 8 may be nice at some point for water resistance (a heavy rain shower killed my SE).

I switched from 6S to XR, and I wasn't expecting much, but oh boy, you don't realize how much of a difference a boost in processing speed and screen size can make. Massive productivity gains, even though I'm primarily a desktop person. That plus the huge battery on the XR fundamentally changes how you think about your phone.

Just FYI: Your options are 64gb, 256gb, 512gb. It honestly doesn't seem likely that they'll change that anytime soon as I haven't heard a single person complain about storage in the last 3 years. While nobody felt that 8/16/32gb was enough.

I happen to be using 50gb atm, on a 3.5 year old phone. But the new cameras have higher resolution photos which take up more space. Plus apps are only ever getting bigger, So I would likely have to pay the extra $100 for the 256gb.

> It honestly doesn't seem likely that they'll change that anytime soon as I haven't heard a single person complain about storage in the last 3 years. While nobody felt that 8/16/32gb was enough.

I'm currently on a 64GB plan with 200GB iCloud subscription, but I share the plan with family. I'm almost at the point where I'll have to upgrade to the 2TB tier (at 3x the price), so I hope they introduce something in between.

iOS 13 is likely the last iOS your 6s would run despite A9 being good enough. Similarly to Catalina being likely the last macOS running on first retina MBP 2012 that are still good enough and likely will be for a few more years (much faster than latest Airs).

I love my mid-2012 MBP. I expect I’ll have to replace it next summer if I want to run the latest Xcode, which will make me very sad. It amazes me that it’s seven years old, as it runs as well as it did they day I bought it.

The most I've ever gotten out of an Android phone is 2 years, and at that point it's crawling, not receiving updates (OS or security) and seemingly just abandoned by the manufacturer. This thread is full of people declaring no reason to update to this latest batch of iphones. To me, that speaks volumes about the iphone ecosystem.

It is a fair price. I just wish the non-Pro had a 512 GB storage option. I'd like to take my whole music library with me - in its original lossless state this is of course not an option due to size, but even when transcoding to a lossy format for mobile use (which iTunes makes very easy while syncing) I'm still looking at roughly 220 GB and counting. My current 256 GB iPhone is obviously at capacity.

Now my only options are a 1500€ iPhone 11 Pro or an affordable Sony Walkman, but I don't really want to carry around another device.

>11 Pro Max 512GB - $1449
For my fellow Canadians, this is $1,905 CAD before taxes, and about $2,152 after taxes. I think this is the first time I've seen a phone go over $2K, at least in my neck of the woods.

Yes that assumes you have use for the camera. Anyone who doesn’t really has no reason to read new phone launch press releases (since about 5 years ago). They are now cameras with other smart phone features tacked on. Incremental increases to cpu/memory/battery/storage but big improvements to picture quality (such as a full stop or two of sensitivity)

You get at least two or three stops more sensitivity if you upgrade from 7 to X. It’s an enormous difference when you need it. You can’t take a picture in broad daylight and say “looks nice and crisp, can’t be better”. Take a photo of something moving, indoors and you’ll see it.

Done at the Genius Bar. I replaced the battery because it was even worse and wild shut down due to not enough voltage. It doesn’t do that anymore, but especially in low signal places it drains very very fast.

I hear you, I upgraded from the 6S to the XS last year. I love both phones, but the 6S was simpler since I didn't need a dongle for headphones. The jump was great for the screen size, but I hate sacrificing the headphones.

That’s the last point that makes me pause, as pairing/unpairing/switching is a PITA and I have four devices I want to hear audio from. I though only airpods and Beats could switch seemlessly so I am intrigued.

My Bose earphones can be connected to two devices concurrently. However it can be paired to a multitude more devices but not connected to them. Which means if you have 3 devices turned on (eg laptop, Switch and phone) it might only be connected to the laptop and phone. So you either have to switch the connection via the phone app (which isn't the prettiest nor most intuitive of apps but it's "good enough" for what it is) or turn off one of the devices and the earphones will auto-switch to the next available pared bluetooth device.

I don't think there is a way in the Bose app of setting an order of preference for which devices will take precedence (eg when I pared with my laptop, the laptop would take ownership and stop the phone from playing everytime the laptop was turned on - which was rather annoying to say the least). But it was a while ago when I last checked.

So you don't have to pair an unpair all the time but there are some annoying edge cases. However it's still easier than unplugging and replugging the cable.

One thing I will say in favour of wired earphones is that the wire itself is actually rather nice tool for not actually losing your earphone. The bluetooth earphones I have are connected via a cable between the two ear pieces (which goes round the back of your neck) which means I can take the earphones out to talk to someone and not worry about dropping or losing an earpiece. So often on the London underground I see people dropping an AirPod and then scrambling around a busy escalator trying to pick the damn thing up. I dread to think how many people have lost or broken their AirPods directly because of their form factor. So if you're the clumsy sort or struggle to find earphones which stick in your ear, then you might be better off sticking to wired earphone or buying headphones instead.

Waterproofing could perhaps be the main feature, the 6S being the last one who didn’t get it. I also wonder if they increased screen durability, with all the shots of phones getting into purses against keys etc.

Also I feel the camera is getting slower as time goes by, and I already replaced the battery.

On Android: You can set default apps for certain links (YouTube, browser, mail client, etc). You can leave spaces or add widgets to the home screen. You can plug the phone into a computer and access the file system like a USB drive. Those are all pretty nice. Of course, iMessage, Apple Wallet, and other features are nice on iPhones. Both are different and good in their own ways.

That ability to record multiple video streams at the same time is the one game changer that jumped out to me. It doesn't matter to me, but a buddy of mine that podcasts and shoots video is about as thrilled as I've ever seen him on apple launch days.

After three years, Pixel users still have to refer to a guide [0] or track down a Google Engineer's Amazon reviews [1] to find a 3rd party USB-C cable on Amazon that doesn't have the potential to fry their device [2].

If I were Apple, I'd be hesitant to jump on to USB-C, when Amazon and gas stations around the world are selling $5 cables and chargers that are so out-of-spec that they introduce the very real possibility of damaging devices that will end up at the Genius Bar for an AppleCare+ repair/replacement.

I get that there's arguably a "general principle of the matter" component here, but the cable that comes with the iPhone is more useful to me than a USB-C version would be. My use cases -- and I doubt I'm an outlier -- are "charge the phone," where it really doesn't matter what the end that plugs into the charger is, and "connect to CarPlay," where my (model year 2019) car has USB-A but not USB-C. If the iPhone shipped with USB-C to Lightning cable and charger, it would be marginally less useful to me -- I'd just have to go buy the USB-A to Lightning cable.

The number of times I've needed to physically connect my iPhone to any of my Macs is, as far as I can recall, zero, and it's been that way for years. Wireless everything has been much, much better for me. The only time I've really used a cable is to do backups before installing beta versions of iOS. (And that backs up to my Mac mini, which -- even in its current updated incarnation -- still has USB-A ports.)

Feeling the same about the 256GB 11 pro max. The 6S is getting long in the tooth and my phone is the single most used device I have. If I can swallow a $1300 laptop upgrade every 4 years then I can do the same for my phone.

I like to see it as the notch just being a big nice screen with additional screen rectangles added on each side. I don't think you find a lot of people who absolutely love the notch, but I like it now.

Yeah I don't really see it as a notch that's intruding on the screen space but rather bonus screen real estate around the sensor cluster. There was never an iPhone that gave you the screen space the notch currently occupies, so it's not like anything was taken away when the notch was introduced.

Hopefully next year. I'm very happy with my 8+ and don't plan on upgrading until Apple gets rid of the notch and has a 128 GB base model. I could live with the 64 GB base model if they figure out how to bring back Touch ID.

This is becoming a parody of where smartphones are up to. Retina display (which was supposed to have higher resolution than can be discerned by the retina) is not enough, now you need Super Retina XYZ! Want a great camera? Two isn't enough, now you need three of them! Oh, and it's fully AI accelarated!

I want a larger screen, but I’m not paying £1.3k just for a larger screen.

Triple lens camera? I don’t care.
A13 bionic? Don’t care either.
WiFi 6? Nice to have, but I don’t have a WiFi 6 router and I don’t need that bandwidth on my phone, so... I don’t care about that either.

My browser has a count of 124 "PRO"s in the article[1], yet I gave up finding any information on how to earn money with an iPhone. I thought that's what professionals are supposed to do/be. I think that's also what the original Macbook Pros were about.

Seems to me that the semantics behind the word is changing. Don't know what it is supposed to mean now, though. Of course it is the best iPhone ever made. It's the most recent one. And even though that should be clear from the get go, they have always made that part clear in the all the keynotes before without having to add a 'pro' into what already is a weird statement.

NB: I'm a happy iPhone user since the 3GS and currently have an iPhone X.

Case in point: I have the more expensive X (because it is less big as the only reason) and I don’t know which model that is. First time I didn’t know what to buy in the store and probably my only tech gadget that I don’t even know the name of.

So the iPhone and iPad line-up look fine to me. Nothing exciting, but it doesn't have to be if you are upgrading every 2-3 years and you are a fan of Apple's tight integration of software and hardware.

The most worrying is the state of the App Store, a graveyard of abandoned apps and games. Apple Arcade looks like it will be such a missed opportunity. Why can I not develop full-fledged iPad apps on my iPad Pro?

The App Store used to be part of reviews of Apple's mobile devices, often giving it the edge over Android. Why is it not anymore?

Unless you're actually planning to shoot a movie on it there doesn't seem to be a lot of need for the Pro. I guess if you really want more battery life it may be worth it, but I'm thinking almost everybody is going to go with the 11 and its already probably overkill cameras. There's just not much to justify spending the extra hundreds of dollars on the Pro model.

I'm wondering... does this mean that the Pro has more battery life again than the XR, or now roughly equal?

Xr had about 2-3 hours more than the Xs I think. But the Pro now leaps by 4 vs Xs, and the 11 leaps by 1 vs Xr... So it should be about equal, perhaps Pro doing better, and the Pro Max def doing better (and should have quite insane battery life).

So I am so disinterested that I cannot even be troubled to go and look at the specs. There is nothing in any of the headlines, etc. that even drives me to look. No reason to upgrade from my 2017 iPhoneX. I used to enjoy this stuff.

All I want is an iPhone 5 form-factor with all screen and FaceID. Smaller is better.

There are rumors of an SE refresh next spring, and I would love if they did what you suggest. But I’m fairly certain that they won’t kill the notch on the SE before they do so on their flagship phones. Perhaps it would be a 2020 SE refresh feature? Until then, there’s be a big ugly notch on a fairly small face.

Jeez. Since the last 3 years I re-watch the iPhone 7's keynote and I can say that my phone ( 7 ) is awesome and I can do such an amazing photos... However I haven't done so and I just use it to take a photo of a document to scan it or some stupid poster that I've seen in the subway.

Oh yeah what happened was you copied Microsoft phone's flat look and you copied the large phones and forgot about what you said. Just like you did with touting the PowerPC RISC set and then switching to Intel. Oh well. I like Apple anyway :)

PS: The Apple SE is like the Cadillac Ciel. They tease people, everyone loves it, but they never release it, to their own detriment!

I know, at the time I posted that neither worked. The keynote said "video unavailable" and the short demo died about 1 minute in. No amount of refreshing or scrubbing would get it to play past that mark.

I have purchased an iPhone every year since the 5. The XS was the first time I regretted it.

It's not bad by any means, but there really wasn't much of a change from the X (which I loved), except for the dual SIM feature. I may upgrade my Series 4 Watch to the Series 5, but I don't feel excited for the iPhone 11 Pro, and find that enormous camera module ugly, though the camera features are tempting.

Since the XS I've felt that Apple should switch to a biennial schedule, with new hardware every other year, while increasing the frequency of minor OS updates.

If they had XS was skipped then the 11 would have been a more exciting release. I feel smartphone tech in general has reached a plateau.

Seems like they are still shipping $1k phone with USB 2.0 transfer speed. I don't mind lightning connector (though usb-c would be nice) but this transfer speed is so disappointing. Even Samsung galaxy s5 note (5 generations back) already had that.

I doubt that these are going to sell a lot, but they have their uses. In many jobs you just buy the phone that takes best presentable pictures and videos without effort and money is not an issue. As much as possible automation and defaults is positive if it gives you good photos.

Real estate agent, free lance journalist, some kind of surveyors, assessors, construction, landscapers, interior designers, repair and maintenance. Either you remember to carry a small camera everywhere in job or you buy a phone. $1000 is not much if you use it for work every day.

Do they list the RAM capacity anywhere? It feels odd not to. (but then it's also a spec where Apple's been decisively beaten in the past, so it makes some sense not to show) I haven't been able to find it on either of the specs pages [0] [1].

Why do you care? I have owned an iPhone for years and I don't even know how much RAM it has. It simply doesn't matter as long as the OS manages it well. Comparing RAM specs between different OS seems pretty pointless.

I do care unfortunately... when I switch from a game to Safari to look up tips on how to get better at the game, that game is often force-closed by iOS and I just lost all my progress. If I'm playing a game and I get a text message and switch to Slack to copy a message into iMessage then back to the game, the game has restarted. If I switch from Safari to the camera app to find a picture then back to Safari, I'll find Safari reloading the page, losing my progress on the web form I was filling out. Actually that last point is why I don't use PWAs and prefer the app, because a PWA will almost always handle being closed worse than an app will.

Most apps handle these things gracefully and it's no problem, but when it's a problem it's a real problem.

Why does anyone care how many CPU cores, GPU shaders, or transistors the new iPhone has, then? Those shouldn't matter either if the OS manages things well, right?

Comparing RAM between different mobile OSes is not particularly relevant, but then neither is raw CPU speed or graphics horsepower. Still, people do the latter all the time - and comparing to previous iPhones IS relevant.

It can be annoying if you just want to switch between a small amount of apps or web pages without having to reload an app or a page every time. More RAM would remedy that on a normal computer. I don't know how iOS or Android handle that though.

Sure, having too little RAM matters. But the number alone won't tell you whether it's enough since it depends so much on how the OS works. You may have a better experience with 2GB on iPhone than with 4GB on Android (for example, no idea if this is true).

I was REALLY looking forward to the iPhone 11 Pro, but at AUD 1999, it’s beyond expensive for me. And I say this as someone who’s owned four iPhones and currently on an iPhone 7 Plus.

The product line is also confusing. There is no longer a iPhone 6/7/8 equivalent. And no, the 11/XR doesn’t count mainly because of the size. I’d have stuck with my current phone if not for terrible cellular connectivity on the crappy intel modem.

Oh well, hope the rumoured SE2 comes out early next year, else it’s time for me to jump ships.

As a European I feel the same. Even €839 for the base model is going to be too expensive for most people.

It seems like they are really trying to carve out a new luxury market for their devices, the equivalent of luxury car brands like Mercedes. I don't think there is anything wrong with that, but I struggle to see how this will play out long term for their ecosystem.

It's not the same as cars or Android, where there are other manufacturers with budget models. And before anyone mentions it, no, continuing to sell the iPhone 8 doesn't count. It's still a €500 phone. Compare that to Xiaomi Redmi and Samsung A and J models which you can get for under €200.

The problem is that you're setting up a bit of a reverse Zeno's paradox. Every iteration gets the "oh, it's hardly noticeable", but at some point it will be. I already find the iPhone 8 to be larger than I'd like, but I've come to terms with the size. The X was noticeably larger than that to me, but I realized that I was going to deal with it. And now it's even larger.

Now, I'm sitting there thinking, wait, why do I need to hear this boasting about the past? Do you have cool shit to show or not? It all just smells like they are trying to impress their own employees and this is something I see so often in other companies, that Apple just didn't do before.

From perspective, both they are good smartphone now. But there are no impressive thing convincing me to buy its. In addition, the high price is one of the reasons to prevent me to buy its. If you are using iPhone 7, iPhone 7 plus or previous generation iPhones, it's good upgrade. I'm still wait for next generation iPhone, i guess it's major upgrade in both design and feature from Apple for iPhone .

I'd rather they make the back uniform thickness so the camera bump is eliminated. Take the extra space for a larger battery. No one is asking for thinner phones but quite a lot of people would love phones with better battery life.

People are almost certainly asking for thinner phones. A very small portion of people probably would prefer a thicker phone with a larger battery, but I strongly suspect that the overwhelming majority of people prefer phones that are as thin as possible with enough battery life for an average day's usage, with the option of carrying an external battery pack for the times when more battery life will be necessary.

I am certainly in the latter camp, in fact, I would prefer an even thinner phone, because I am almost always within arm's reach of a charger and rarely even need "a full day" of battery life.

Are they? Almost everyone I know has a case on their phone; and I didn't have one until I bought the iPhone XS, which is over $1k and has glass on both sides.

I mean, don't get me wrong; I like the capabilities of the new iPhones. But the current design means that what most people actually use not the slick shiny slimness you see in Apple promotional materials, but thick sturdy plastic keeping all that fragile glass safe.

If Johnny Ives really wanted to be able to see people use phones the way he envisioned them, he should have designed it to withstand a 10-foot drop onto concrete. That would be a lot more useful than 30 minutes underwater.

I don't think people put cases on their phone to make them thicker. I think they use cases to increase durability. Making the phone itself thinner means that the phone in a case will also be thinner, so that's perfectly compatible with the claim that people prefer thinner phones.

In my case - in the case of everyone I've chatted with that has a camera bump - it's to reduce the risk of damage to (or caused by) the camera bump. Otherwise, most of them would get a significantly thinner case, the rest getting no case at all.

2) when set on a flat surface, it creates an unstable bridge, meaning downward pressure on the phone is not supported. Think of how a piece of cardboard would react to being pressed down in the middle with only 3 of its corners supported.

3) It creates a point that can be snagged when moving the phone around, either on clothing or surfaces it's set on.

Personal opinion, it's really frustrating to have a phone that doesn't sit flat on a surface, to be unable to easily use it without some kind of case or holding it.

This so much, I had to give up going case-less after my Galaxy S2 because of that ridiculous trend of glass backs and generally fragile designs. Designs that are in fact completely useless except for marketing material because almost everyone will need to put a case around them.

I didn't have a case on my 3GS, nor my 4S, nor my 5S. I dropped them all many times and never had anything more thank a couple of nicks.

Tried to do the same with my 6S, where the glass goes over the edge of the phone. Cracked the screen 3 times, got a thin case. When I decided I wanted to upgrade to an XS rather than repair the screen again, the wife said only if you get a proper case; and I had a hard time disagreeing with her.

I'm positive that Apple could design a phone smaller than the combined size of the XS a good case, which would handle the drops I subject my phone to occasionally just fine. It would be a little thicker and less pretty than the current phone without a case, but much less thick and much less ugly than the current phone with a case.

This comment is weird. What you're saying is exactly what Apple has been doing for 5 years straight. The iPhone has been getting thicker each year since 2014 (iPhone 6 was the tinnest iPhone ever), battery size has been increasing every year as well. They've been increasing the camera size too though, so that's why it's still a bump.

While I agree with you and felt the same way as you, I found that it wasn't as big an issue once I bought a case for the phone. Once you put a case on the phone the camera bump completely disappears.

I dont know what percentage of iPhone users go case-less with their phones, but I haven't seen one being used without a case.. and I have been actively looking for them.

I say this as a person who used to go case-less with my iPhones until my iPhones started having camera bumps. Then I started to get a case to rid myself off the camera bump. Last year I got the leather case, and while I winced at the ridiculous price I paid for it, I have been extremely happy with the choice. The blend of steel, glass and leather feels and looks great.

I have never used a case and never will (just don’t like the bulk they add). I do use an edge-to-edge screen protector on my XS max and keep the phone face down so the camera lenses don’t get scratched or smudged.

Been using iPhone since the 3G (X since release), have yet to smash one and have never used a case. Don't think day will ever come because cases suck and not dropping your phone isn't exactly rocket science.

Most people would not want this because people use plastic cases to improve drop performance (to the chagrin of Apple). A case on a uniform thickness phone shadows light and makes ultra-wide angle optics more challenging.

Not really, almost everyone I interact with uses a phone case. I have one friend who does not have a case on his iPhone 6, and he's actively trying to break that into a state of disrepair so he can justify upgrading to a new phone.

Now this is slick. I don’t think sensor fusion is a large focus for apple, judging from their lack of talking points on it. I would think with the resources to make their own ISP they could do some serious information theory work and put out photos that look far better than what smartphones do today. I originally figured that this low hanging fruit would be immediately exploited by phone manufacturers putting multiple camera sensors on a single phone, but I think that may be a little too optimistic and its something we’ll have to wait another few years to see.

That’s too bad. It looks like this is an area ripe for some academic work. The math is all already established and the models would not be intense to develop but would provide large payoffs. It’s a much lighter version of interferometry. I don’t see why this isn’t a more hotly discussed topic.

I feel like the best compromise would be to utilize the new, larger camera bump to add a slightly larger image sensor, even just 25-50% larger than the current sensors. I feel like it would make a noticeable improvement to the image quality, and justify the giant bump on the back of these devices.

Will the three cameras allow taking pictures with weird 3D or color effects? IE take a picture with all three of the cameras and interlace them to get trinocular vision or make RGB filters (red on camera 1 etc). You could even do it in video maybe?

That would be cool. I mostly dont care about a bigger screen or better battery.

The FiLMiC Pro demo showed that apps have access to all four camera simultaneously at some frame rate or another, so such a thing might be possible. Matching the images would be tricky, given that all three rear lenses have different focal lengths.

I'm not looking forward to setting an alarm for 5 am on Friday. I understand those on edt didn't like a 3 am time but it seems that there could have been a different compromise. Like 8 am pdt. Is that so they can say everything is sold out before the morning news cycle?

Where is the new and wacky stuff that Apple is working on? Facebook has Oculus VR and those weird solar powered airplanes providing Internet access in rural countries. Google has its self driving cars. Where's Apple's research project?

I only hope they keep the iPhone 6s/7/8 form factor. I've just bought a 6s the other month and enjoy its compactness and adequateness after my state-of-the-art, super-heavy Samsung S8 turned out not robust and mobile enough for my use :(

Honestly I was hoping that the leaked images were somehow very wrong. I hate the look of the back of the phone now. Who thought a rectangular module with a triangle of circular cameras would look good? It doesn't. It looks terrible.

i am sick and tired of hearing apple claim "best", "first-ever", "most advanced", etc. in all their marketing. it's all unfounded, usually even false, and always misleading. there were smartphones last year that had the three-camera system (lg v40, which has more features in general as well). big deal.

for the most cringe-inducing experience of this, go read apple's marketing/product page for their new credit card. they act as if they've invented plastic for the first time.

Comments here are missing one point. The very first thing the page says is “a new pro line for iPhone that delivers advanced performance for users who want the very best smartphone”. This is not meant to appeal to the mass market. It’s to silence critics that the competition is faster, has a better camera, longer battery, etc.

It’s true, this phone is not innovative and they pretty much say that.

I’m curious what would be innovative in a phone now, as opposed to incremental.

Unfortunately, no matter how fast the hardware gets, the iOS UX is the limiting factor and just as slow as years ago because of the useless UI animations and clutter that do nothing but waste time. Much of the UX isn't even interactive until the animation loop is finished which makes it tedious to use quickly.

It's like using a superfast desktop but limiting your mouse clicks to one every 5 seconds.

Is it just me or does the 3 camera design look disgusting? The design is plain ugly. I love apple for their thoughtful and aesthetic design, but I feel Steve Jobs would not have approved that square 3 camera design.

I am getting the feeling that Johnny Ive left the company over disagreement with such decisions.

Went to college in 2002 as the first cohort through a newly created "digital imaging technology" program. I failed an assignment because I wrote about how SSD would become standard over HDD, something "incredibly unlikely" - I wonder how my professors feel today.

I'm all in for the iPhone Pro but the smaller one with 256GB will be the expensive phone I will ever buy. It is really expensive in Europe, it will cost in Spain 1329€ ($1.467,36). Insane, yes, but I think this model is really worth the price.

I was hoping for USB-C and no camera bump on the back. Just make the phone 1mm thicker and add some extra battery. I guess that would be too much... We have to live with the "up to 4h" extra battery life that would probably translate in 1h of extra battery in the real world. It's just depressing.

The 11 Pro is 0.4mm thicker than the XS (and the X/XS were 0.6mm thicker than the 7). They're slowly getting there.

> We have to live with the "up to 4h" extra battery life that would probably translate in 1h of extra battery in the real world

Comparing the numbers to the stated numbers for the iPhone XS, "streaming video" has actually gone down by 3 hours. And they removed the "internet use" spec completely. You can now listen to music for 65 hours instead of 60 though.

You don't need a 2 hour long presentation to give small spec bumps. The problem is that everyone now expects this whole yearly circus, and Apple puts on a show even though they only have very incremental improvements to show. It also doesn't help that most of the the cool software features were already announced at WWDC.

Better computational photography with added camera hardware, new immersive audio algorithms, on-CPU changes for optimized ML matrix computations, etc, are not "small spec bumps". If you think they are it's likely because companies like Apple are so incredible at delivering this kind of stuff that it seems routine.

1. Spec bumps: These are mostly invisible to the consumer, it just gives them a phone that's slightly faster or lasts longer. Faster matrix multiply falls into this category.

2. Features: These are actual changes the user can see and interact with. I named a few examples, both on software (animoji/sound focus) and hardware (face unlock/soli) side.

This presentation had almost none of the latter, other than Dark Mode. I'm not sure why that statement is so hard to understand. None of the stuff you named were really features. No one goes to the store to buy the phone with the slightly faster cpu or better matrix multiplies.

I'm never sure why everything always has to be about "X was slow to do Y, and now they're finally catching up to Z".

It is how it is, just let it be. If you prefer a certain brand then just go with that brand. Otherwise it's just a wasted effort to be trying to brag for one brand you don't even work for that they did something faster than another one.

Other than the 20% faster CPU, 4-5 additional hours of battery life, 2e6:1 contrast ratio, and 30% faster FaceID (which might be the difference between the phone seeming to immediately unlock and pausing briefly)?

If Intel or AMD announces a 20% faster chip it would be met with applause. Now imagine if they announced a 20% faster chip that also used 25% less energy. And it also takes great pictures with three different lenses, recognizes your face, has one of the best screens ever made, and so on. If that's not impressive, what would Apple have to do to be impressive?

honestly, the XS/XR one was the same for me. I have an iPhone X and there was zero temptation to upgrade to XS/XR and a meh amount to the 11/11 Pro (11R/11S).

I think phone advancement cycles have hit a point where I'm kind of underwhelmed from everyone and that's fine. I just want Apple to come out with one using USB-C instead of Lightning (to match iPad Pro and MacBook Pro and being able to rid myself of my lightning cables), 5G (for future proofing), and maybe in-display fingerprint.

I could go for a model like that and my next upgrades will probably just be the batteries until it bites the dust.

Same. I bought a 7+ when my 6 died, and I hated every minute with that phone. My X is, IMO, the best iPhone I've ever owned, and have no real desire to upgrade. Usually I upgrade every 2 years, on the "S" cycle (the 6 was an aberration), as I cared more about performance than having the latest 'look' phone.

This is probably the first time I haven't felt the hankering at the 2 year mark.

This is me. I'm still rocking an iPhone 7 but use an iPhone X as my work phone. I think the iPhone 11 will get the upgrade for my personal device but I'll probably still with the X for work unless I notice a huge difference in camera quality.

Yep, I've got an iPhone X and feel like it's fine for another year. Although the battery life improvements are supposed to be notable? Personally the next big thing I'm waiting for is USB-C so iPhone 12 it is...

To each their own. The improvements in computational photography like automatically stitching a few pictures together for higher resolution and night mode are pretty incredible. And the improved dynamic range, resolution, and added wide angle lens are nice improvements.

I've updated every 2 years for the past 8 years or so -- even back then I never felt the need to upgrade the very next year, but by 2 years out I've always been pretty excited for the improvements. And this year that still holds, I'm excited to upgrade my iPhone X.

"Incredible" is a pretty big stretch. When you can calibrate the cameras yourself, the math isn't actually that difficult to work out. Also, there are plenty of us that use the phone in a "pro" sense as a mobile computing device, not as a photographer or film director.

If you type the say command into Terminal on a Mac and have it say "iPhone X" or "Mac OS X" it will pronounce it correctly (Ten instead of X). Doesn't relate much to the argument, other than being a neat easter egg.

They're changing the product positioning in the line so that the most popular model is now the "normal" one, and premium models are a step up from that. Honestly I like it better than giving the high end model the default branding with a worse model below it that most people will actually buy.

1.5 hour just to re-announce Arcade/TV+, and give a small spec bump to iPad, Apple Watch and iPhone. What a waste of time. The only real new feature the iPhone got was Night Mode which is an exact copy of the computational stuff Pixel does with Night Sight, from their description.

My company with low 5-digit users hosts an hour-long monthly webinar about product updates. The iPhone is one of the most popular consumer items in the world, I think it’s reasonable for Apple to spend 1.5 hours/year talking about what’s changing

I was hoping for Tile-like trackers. I wonder if they'll show up later this fall in a different event. Would make sense to put it close to the holiday shopping season. Still, would have liked to have seen them today...

Idk. Here's my interpretation: People are complaining because their expectations are high and they want Apple to excite them. It doesn't have to do with assigning value to incremental improvements at all. As as aside, I think you'll find people who've taken calculus will more likely be the ones quibbling and complaining. High standards, attention to detail, yadda yadda.

I am an iPhone user who refuses to upgrade from my 7+ until this silly notch business is removed. It does not "disappear completely and immediately", especially when viewing landscape mode video content.

Sorry, I was not specific enough. It's a "silly notch" to people who don't use an iPhone with the notch. If you never upgrade, it will remain a silly notch to you forever, while those who do upgrade find that it disappears completely and immediately, as I said.

If you want to watch landscape video, a double tap switches between notched and non-notched views, so you can choose if you care. Most people don't after day one.

I do not own a phone with a notch, but I’m under the impression that most video content is not wide enough for the notch to cut into the video.
I think you have the option of zooming in a bit to remove black bars on edges; with the drawback that corner pixels and the notch area are lost. Same as any other non-16:9 phone

I always thought I'd be bothered by a notch, but when my old phone eventually gave up the ghost I saw a great deal for a Huawei phone with a notch, and I immediately got used to the design. I expected to need at least a few days to acclimatize myself, but it was instant, weirdly enough. Now Now it never even enters my mind until I hear someone talking, or see comments, about notches in phones.

I would agree if there was something radical from others. It's all been incremental from everyone ever since the iPhone 4. So it's not a CEO thing. There really isn't any new feature that the masses need from these devices anymore.

That said, as you can see from the thunderous applause after every sentence in that auditorium, the herd laps up dull shit.

I'll never buy another iPhone without the analog Home button. Having a hardwired "I'm stupid" button makes me feel safe. Keeping it in software means that, when my phone inevitably slows down or crashes, I have no recourse but to wait for the phone to be responsive again.

I know they do it to keep the repair costs down and I appreciate that but the analog button is just that important to me.

I dunno, the home button on my first ipod touch (1G) broke, which basically killed that device for me. Meanwhile, I've been on Android for a long time now, and the on-screen home button has never really been an issue like I thought it might. After all, slow software can ignore a hardware input, too.

Of all the reasons not to buy this this one seems a bit silly to me. How is this such a big problem? I have an older iPhone where the camera sticks out as well and I don't even realize it. It has zero effect on day to day use. And if it does cause problems just get a case?

And yet way more iPhones with camera bumps have been sold than ones without. Life moves on. In the real world almost everyone uses a case and that negates any camera bump. People will make fun of it for a day or two online, but it just doesn't matter.

I hate cases but Apple is making this less and less tenable over time. Not just the camera bump but also the lower quality glass they use on the screen that easily scratches now. I used to never have a problem up until about the iPhone 7

This is a huge generalization. Close to half of Americans have iPhones, and most because you know, it has iMessage and their friends have iMessage, or you know, because iPhones are vastly more secure and have vastly better support than their competitors, or because they're meant to be simple/easy to use, etc.

To say half of Americans are finicky and love aesthetics because there's no other reason anyone would buy one is a bit of a stretch.

(I'm probably buying an iPhone this year for the first time ever, and I don't really care how it looks, or how good it's photos are, and I'm definitely putting a case on it.)

It is usually offet by the phone cover. It is actually quite clever: SINCE the cover needs to have a hole anyway for the camera, use that hole to sneak a bigger lens. All the while ensuring the hole is facing the camera, since without protrusion the hole may not be exactly in front.

Specs are falling behind but I'm hoping to get another few years before I have to replace it.

Camera bump bothers me less on the phones than it does on the iPad because even a thin case flattens it out. But the iPad's camera bump is the only reason I have a thick case on the back of that. It's either at a desk or in my bag, I'm not going to drop it.

EDIT: I should add that I don't drop my phone because it's small enough that my fingers can actually grip around it. But my asshole of a cat knocked it off the nightstand a couple days ago and cracked the corner of the case, so a properly sized phone isn't a 100% solution to avoiding phone damage. Buying a $1000 phone and not having a case on it is nuts.

The photos used an example don't even look that good. They look heavily photoshopped. If apple really thinks they can overprocess their way into professional photography, they've got another thing coming.

While I understand the need to make the camera more powerful (and it's one of the iPhone's truly outstanding capabilities), I just can't understand how Apple decided the design of iPhone 11. (not the Pro)

Was that new camera system really needed in iPhone 11? It... well... just literally spoiled the design... I understand the need of iPhone 11 Pro's cameras... but really? the 11?